Wrack, Canis, Kestrel

From the Brooklyn Bridge, the wrackline is visible on the lawn in Empire Fulton Ferry section of Brooklyn Bridge Park. It’s all over but the clean up in my part of Brooklyn, but Lower Manhattan on the other side of the bridge is still dark.In DUMBO, one of the moss-painted animals left over from the recent art fest.Speaking of public art, this is evidently a piece of it. I believe it is supposed to make us think about the interface between nature and culture (you don’t want to know my visceral, or emotional, view of it). As I entered the Promenade, I noticed some nature atop it. I didn’t have my binoculars, but I’ve been birding long enough now to recognize a fair amount of the “general impression of size and shape” of birds. This is a notion adopted by bird watchers from WWII, where the quickest possible recognition of distant airborne shapes could be a matter of life and death (was it one of ours or one of their’s?). The civilian version is much nicer. Falcons, like many other species, are quite distinctive, even from a distance.The digital zoom resolved the identification: slate blue wings, rufus/cinnamon back and tail, with a spot of white on the chin. American Kestrel (Falco sparverius), a male. The bird spent a lot of time staring down, looking for food. He flew to another light pole, the one visible on the right below:That swath of salt-water-drenched green has animals in it. The kestrel pounced down there twice, the second time flying off to yet another pole with something to eat. I wonder what? Kestrels are our smallest falcon, about the size of a blue jay, which means they don’t predate very big things. I’ve always read they are great hunters of dragonflies, although I’ve never seen them hawk them out of the air, but there are no dragonflies around around now.