Adding streets to Open Street Maps

As Monty Python is likely to say, "And now for something completely different."

An area that I go to for birding is adding new streets and has also extended a footpath. While I was out walking the footpath I discovered that Open Street Maps (OSM) had part of the footpath but not the new part. What is Open Street Maps you ask!?!?!? Well... it is a crowd source map of the entire world. It is capable of representing most anything and everything so it has footpaths, streets, businesses, houses, plots of land, etc.

So, a few days ago, I got a GPS track and learned how to fix the footpath in OSM using the GPS track to help me. Yea for me!!

But a few mournings ago, I had a "brilliant" idea!!! I could use my drone to take aerial images of where the new streets were and use that to help me add the new streets. Why!?!?!? Because I'm bored I suppose.

Well... it turns out that doing this is way more complicated than I had imagined. Along the way, I discovered other Open Maps such as Open Aerial Map and Open Drone Map.

Open Drone Map has software that will crunch the 48 images I took with my drone, piece them together and add metadata tags to scale, rotate, and precisely place the images so that mapping software can use it. Then upload the resulting image to Open Aerial Maps which then provides an interface back to Open Street Maps with the existing part of the map with the new image added in. It is then a matter of drawing the new features into OSM. Kinda fun...

Here is the view I had just as I finished editiing showing the Open Street Map data and the image that the Open Drone Map created.

No Bald Eagles but an American Kestrel

The last eBird list of sightings mentioned a confirmed Bald Eagle nest somewhere around Lake Granger which is about an hour's east of me but still in Williamson county. I've been out that way before. It is kind of a long ways to truck but it seemed fun. I didn't see any Bald Eagles at all -- which is a slight surprise. But what I did find were American Kestrels. They seemed to be very skittish and I could barely start to approach before they flew. I saw at least two and then a third which might have been the same as the second. I saw a few others birds on the trip. The better images are below. I hope you enjoy them.

An Osprey, Great Egret and Snowy Egrets, and an Eastern Phoebe Confrontation!

I went out to Georgetown's San Gabriel Park but actually on the far eastern side close to Katy Crossing Trail Park. As soon as I got out of the car, there was an Osprey asking where had I been all day!!!! Another pair of Red-shoulder Hawks but not sitting together. And there were Egrets of two different sizes. Do you know how to tell the difference aside from just size? The Great Egret has a yellow bill and black legs while the Snowy Egret has the opposite: black bill and yellow feet. The end of the outing I watched Eastern Phoebe's catching insects and fighting over who got the favorite perch.

I hope you enjoy the images and short video

A Pair of Red-shoulder Hawks!

I got out finally after the ice storm Fern and went to Old Settler's pond. There were the usual assortment of ducks and egrets. I some Red-winged Blackbirds which is slightly unusual. Three White-winged Doves sitting in a tree (they looked cold). But the big adventure was a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks! Weee!!!! 😀

I hope you enjoy the images.

And I didn't fall on my ass ONCE!!!!

Winter Storm Fern came to town. I woke to 20º and sleet on the ground. I got my drone out and flew a quick lap and then spent the rest of the day trying to figure out a new tool for videos: DaVinci Resolve. It is a relatively simple video but I hope you find it relaxing.

Looking for birds before the big winter storm hits...

There is a winter storm coming. I didn't know this but now they name winter storms. The one coming is "Winter Storm Fern". Gosh...

Anyhow, I thought the cold weather might be pushing birds, ducks in particular, down south. Lake Devine in Leander had a lot of ducks a few weeks ago but the last time I was there, it wasn't mostly empty. I wanted to go check it out today to see how populated it was. I figure there were about 400 ducks there.

But as I looked at the ducks, I kept noticing other birds. Birds which were odd in Williamson county.

The images is one of each of the species I identified today: fifteen of them. The Ring-necked Duck is the frontmost duck in that image. The other ducks in the image are Redheads and American Wigons. The Wilson's Snipe is my first.

I hope you enjoy the images.

Activities over the past 22 days...

As the previous blog post suggests, I started birding. I started this mostly to fight depression and anxiety and the negative thoughts and feelings that I was having. But when I post my images, I wanted the images to have tags. So I got off on various tangents. One was to write a script to tag the images. I didn't know how I wanted the process to work. I didn't know how I wanted Lightroom, SmugMug, and this blog to work. Along the way, I got off on another tagent (not finished) of going through all of my images since 2001 and finding the birds and properly identifying them. Then I wanted to add them to my "Life List" on ebird. While doing this, I got off on another tangent (also not completed) of going through all my images from a 2007 trip to Antarctica that I took. And, you guessed it, this got me off on yet another third tagent to find and enter reasonably accurate GPS coordinates for all of the roughly 4000 images.

There was a ship's GPS log passed around at one point but I don't have it; I never did. And so far everyone I've contacted doesn't have it either. But I found a really accurate blog post and I have used it to get accurate GPS locations through the trip. Side note: I think I have gone through life only half aware of reality. This blog post has way more detail than I ever knew about and he was just an equal participant like me.

So, the Antarctice images have been GPS tagged and reverse tagged (going from GPS to country, state, city, etc). And I have found about 25 differnt birds that I saw and photographed during the trip. I will make a blog post about these in a day or two. For now, here are the birds I found in December of 2025 tagged like I wanted them. Please share your thoughts on the tagging, life, and Pluto (the dog).