October 2012
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Dead Horse Bay
Yellow-rumped warblers and Green Darner dragonflies before we got to the landfill edge.One of two Royal Terns, Thalasseus maximus, both with bands on their left legs. Not a commonly sighted bird in the city; I didn’t know what they were at first. The smaller Common and Little Terns we see here during summer have already…
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BBP Eye Candy
Take away a little green pigmentation and what do you get? You can open these up to fill your Monday morning computer screen by clicking on them, because you probably need a little boost to the start of your week. The last image would make a particularly good mini trifold screen, and since you’re using…
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Mammal
Awwwww…. Some three feet off the ground, in the thick of the plants. We think it’s a young brown rat, Rattus norvegicus, whiskers atwitter.
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Furman Cattails
The Furman Street rooftop cattail mini-garden is still going strong. Diagonal roof line necessitated by your blogger not wanting to venture too far out into Furman Street’s under-the-BQE dragstrip raceway.
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Pine Siskins
Pine siskins, Spinus pinus, have been passing through town this past couple of weeks. These were in Brooklyn Bridge Park yesterday. This was forecast to be a big year for these typically boreal birds, pushed down to our latitudes by weather and other conditions in Canada, and it has been. A small, streaky bird with…
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Interior Katydid
As if to reinforce the point to this blog — that inexhaustible nature is everywhere — what should I find on the inside of my building’s front door this morning? A katydid, with only five legs. I haven’t heard any katydids on the street in a while, but I have run across them before in…
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Jamaica Bay and Colombia
One of the male ospreys who breeds in Jamaica Bay was fitted with a GPS tracker this migration season. The bird is now “wintering” in Colombia. I put wintering in quotes because although migratory birds head south to avoid our winter, they go to places in Central and South America where winter is an extremely…
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Red-breasted
I practically walked into this Red-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) a week ago on Nantucket. We were eye-to-eye for a moment, until it worked its way further into some kind of tiny-leaved elm. The island was flush with these nuthatches while I was there. I even saw a few White-breasted Nuthatches on the island, which I…
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Trick
Those fake cobwebs some people insist on garbaging their homes with this time of year turn out to be as effective as real cobwebs in trapping dust, bits of leaves, and, as I noticed on Congress St. the other day, a dozen wasps.Vespula maculifrons, the Eastern Yellowjacket. Black antennae, remember, are good for IDing the…
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Early Autumn
Yellow-rumped warblers, catbirds, hermit thrushes, various sparrows, honey bees, bumblebees, large milkweed bugs, and one lone dragonfly, amid the seedheads, drooping stalks, and last hurrah of blooms.
Backyard and Beyond 