Field Notes: Prospect

With spring here — bursting, budding, crawling, squawking — the changes seen out there will be daily, impossible to keep up with. For there isn’t only the seeing, there’s the recording, and there are only so many hours in the day.

On Friday, I walked through Prospect Park. The highlights were two species of butterflies, one of them either a question mark or a comma. Should I presume the larva wintered over? There were so many turtles out in the sun, many still quite sluggish. I found a turtle shell. There was the unmistakable plop of a frog in some reeds that also had a female red-wing blackbird staying on the down low, and a mockingbird fanning its wing and tail feathers amid the pick-up-sticks craziness of the phragmites. Was it trying scare up arthropods? The common grackles on the Peninsula, even with a pump throbbing in the distance as part of the construction of the new ice rink, made magical noise. I was the only one there.

There was this inch-plus long structure:
a cocoon, but containing what?

You look up (northern flickers join the mix of birds; male and female downy woodpeckers follow each other), you look down. The old leaves, all gray, masses of sweetgum pods, and what’s this?
Some kind of comb. Not honey bee, it seems too small, and the shape wrong for a feral hive, but some other species of hymenoptera.