May 2015
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Edge of Brooklyn
Marine Park Nature Center. Willet (Tringa semipalmata).Great Egret (Ardea alba).Yellow-crowned Night-Heron (Nyctanassa violacea), a bird that does not penetrate the city as much as the Black-crowned Night-Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax), but can be found along its edges. The western strip of Marine Park was not restored when the grasslands and salt-water marsh was done. It’s a…
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And the jellies shall inherit the Earth
One of the few things to survive our destruction of the oceans are the jellies. They thrive in the desolation we have made for them. I wrote about this last year in reviewing the book Stung!
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Rodentia
There’s a debate around here about which of our rodent friends this young’un is. There were at least ten of them strung out along about thirty feet of paved path in Prospect Park recently, most of them with their eyes still closed, some not moving, others scurrying regardless of their eyelids. I don’t know what…
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New Robins
Out of the nest, still being fed by the parents. Fledged, but less a flier than a hopper and a climber at the moment. People often think birds need help at this stage — can’t fly, looks helpless, no sign of the parents — but they usually don’t. The parents are near, but keeping away…
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Raptor Wednesday
No pictures today, but I do have the link to the 55 Water Street Peregrines. There are four young this year, still looking like fluffy off-white chickens, but that is changing rapidly. When typing this (last night), I pulled up the page expecting to see nothing in the dark, but there was enough ambient light…
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Butterflies Galore
Over the weekend, I lost count of the number of species of butterflies I saw, most of them for the first time this year. This included a Monarch (predictably scouting out Milkweeds), so that’s a good start. American Ladies (Vanessa virginiensis), like the one above in Green-Wood, and Red Admirals were all over.There were at…
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Monday Morning Preening
This is an extreme telephoto, but the bright yellow toes here are a give-away: Snowy Egret (Egretta thula). This bird is a little like a miniaturized version of the Great Egret (Ardea alba), but with black bill/yellow toes to the Great’s yellow bill/black toes. Both species were almost hunted to extinction for their breeding plumes,…
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Good Fences?
An immovable object meets a growing force. The city is full of such cases, of fences and street signs being absorbed by growing trees. I think here of the dialectic in Frost’s “Mending Wall.” One voice says “something there is that doesn’t love a wall” and the other, the more-often quoted, says “good fences make…
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Mighty Elm
An enormous American Elm (Ulmus americana) crowding a yard on 44th Street near 3rd Avenue in Sunset Park. The old giant took us by surprise: the neighborhood still suffers from the blight of highway above 3rd Avenue, a product of the 1940s and a wretched vision of a promised land of highways to segregated suburbs.…
Backyard and Beyond 