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Raptor Wednesday
Recent Cooper’s Hawk sightings. Above: Sunset Park. The Battery, at the southern tip of Manhattan. Pier 4, Brooklyn Army Terminal. Same Pier 4 bird chased some Fish Crows off this paddle wheel party boat. Sunset Park again, from my window. (This is a regular perch for this adult.) Bush Terminal Park. The following is this…
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Duck Roulette
Or maybe a slot machine? Three ducks, all winners: Common Merganser (not common here), Red-breasted Merganser, and Wood Duck on Sylvan Water (and ice). Merganser size-comparison. The last Common Merganser I saw in Green-Wood (which was also the first I saw there) was in February 2025.
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Geese Feasts?
On January 30th, I heard about and then saw a dead Canada Goose on the Sylvan Water ice. I passed by several times over the next week wondering if all this frozen meat was going to go to waste in this hard winter. Then on February 9th I saw that somebody had gotten to it.…
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On A Mission
A couple of Fish Crows were poking around this large plastic bag on a bench on Pier 4. There was clearly something inside, but they were having difficulty getting inside, mostly because they were on the wrong end of things. If this isn’t a request for help, I don’t know what is. (I was on…
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Natural History
Some natural history notes from George Templeton Strong’s extraordinary Civil War Diaries, out in a new edition from Library of America edited by friend-of-the-blog Geoff Wisner. I. In September, 1864, Strong retails an anecdote from Washington DC. It seems a fan of George McClellan, the failure of a Union General who became a failure of…
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Dinosaur/Dinosaur Jr.
Ivan Argote’s “Dinosaur” in High-Line Park. If millions of Americans can worship an idol of gold trumpery that’s nothing but a spray-painted pile of shit, then New Yorkers can definitely honor their local deities.
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Raptor Wednesday
A lot of my Peregrine photos are like this. This one was stooping down on a Red-tailed Hawk perched on an air-conditioner above Court St. across from Borough Hall, which is all Peregrine territory. Here’s another, high atop a chimney. So, recently, when I spied this in the distance, I hustled over and clumped through…
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Gull Fight in EDC Airspace
A couple of American Herring Gull tangle over the private airspace of the Made in Brooklyn* complex, illustrating kleptoparasitism and its avoidance. *While photographing ducks out in the bay, your correspondent was recently told photography wasn’t allowed on this NYC Economic Development Corporation property by the rent-a-cop patrolling it. I guess they’ve never heard of…
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Backyard and Beyond 