Backyard and Beyond

Herring Gull amidst Brant.

Great Black-backed Gull amidst Herring, Brant, and Ring-billed. Great Black-backed is the world’s largest species of gull.

Our triumvirate of winter gulls. From the top, Herring, Great Black-backed, and Ring-billed. Strays and exotica show up, and Bonaparte’s Gull is found off-shore, but these are the three standard gulls of the NYC winter. Ring-billed predominate by a long shot.

To spice things up, this is Great Black-backed in its first winter, or so I judge. Ring-billed in the background.

(A sunny day!) Ring-billed left, Herring right.

See how that outer tail feather is so much shorter than the central feathers? Coopers have tails usually described as rounded at the tip; this is why. Of note because Sharp-shinned Hawks have a straight edge to their tail fan.

I’ve written a new Medium piece… on raptors!

This snaggy perch can be a good place for Merlin, but in this case it’s an adult Coopers Hawk.

Ready for some stretching…

Oh-oh, stand back!

Coop poop.

This scappy specimen may be explained by the damaged foot.

It’s fruiting body weather.

Finding a nutty something on the ground, this Red-breasted Nuthatch wedged it into some bark and began to work out the meat.

Looks like this has happened a few times here.

Note sure this is the same bird. But it sure is a pale specimen.

Judging from the number and freshness of sap holes, this crab apple is visited often by Yellow-breasted Sapsuckers.

Ubiquitous yet elusive… the three-alarm fire of winter is fairly camera-shy, but in this case I happened to be below the bird on a slope.

A sapling… Hawthorn, I guess. The spine and twig swellings suggest galls to me, but I haven’t tracked any causative agents.

Hawthorns, genus Creteagus, have a colorful taxonomic history. Find a century old tree book and you’ll see hundreds of species in North America alone. In the northern hemisphere, there were supposed to be about 1000 species all told. Today, a couple hundred seems to be the acceptable number.

Deja vu all over again? Recently, on this very antenna, a Merlin was eating. But this is no Merlin:

The queen of all she surveys. There have only been two day this year that I haven’t seen this female American Kestrel on her patch in my neighborhood. (Well, I presume she’s the same bird.)

She’s usually seen on this antenna tower, which is across the street from the TV-dinner antenna.

Here she is strafing a Cooper’s Hawk, policing the territory.