October 2017
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Memento Mori
Found in the shadowy gully between window and screen of someone else’s fourteenth story apartment, a veritable mausoleum of desiccated Diptera and at least one Hymenoptera. I’m just finishing up my costume for tonight: I’m going as a landfill full of Halloween garbage.
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Just Wow
Common Buckeye, Junonia coenia.
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Look Out: Ranger Robin is Back!
After an unaccountable absence of several years (!), the incomparable Ranger Robin, the no-holds-barred rogue Park Ranger Action Figure, defrocked (hmm, perhaps that’s the wrong word in this context?), excommunicated, and turned out to pasture by the fools in power, is back! Probably on account of good behavior…. And damn, is she anxious. What, she…
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Hudson Isopoda
Pulling a boat line out of the 79th Street Boat basin on the Hudson River recently resulted in a pier squiggling with isopods. They had clearly found the rope, submerged since the spring, to their liking. Isopoda are an order of crustaceans. Most are aquatic, but you may be more familiar with the terrestrial type,…
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Spider
This 2″-long orb-weaver has been hanging out here since August. The web, quite tattered, is as high and wide as half the window. The animal is remarkably inactive, positioned in the center of web for most of the day, although she will quickly retreat into a nook in the storm-window frame when feeling shy. The…
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The Blackbird of Song and Legend
The Common or Eurasian Blackbird, Turdus merula. Unlike our New world blackbirds, this is a thrush, and rather similar to the American Robin (Turdus migratorius) in habit. Our blackbirds are Icteridae; the thrushes are Turdidae. Our Robin, meanwhile, isn’t related to their Robin (Erithacus rubecula).This is the bird that bursts out of the pie, alive…
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Weekend Update
It’s been absurdly warm. Lots of trees are nowhere ready to shake off their leaves. Bumblebees, which can take 60 degree temperatures, you might expect to still be around, but some of the smaller bees were out and about, too. This metallic green bee of the Agapostemon genus, for instance. But it’s late October: there…
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What’s the opposite of anthropomorphism?
I used to follow the rules forbidding anthropomorphism. But this old thought, allegedly “scientific,” has fallen to the wayside the more I observe animals, and the more I learn about them. This, then, jumped out at me in Lynda Lynn Haupt’s Pilgrim on the Great Bird Continent: “In his observations of seals and caracaras and…
Backyard and Beyond 