October 2017
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The Canary on the Windshield
Or rather, the lack of one. The canary in this case is all the dead bugs people used to have to wipe off their windshields. Michael McCarthy, who titled his book on the great decline of life on earth during our watch The Moth Snowstorm, writes about being old enough to remember all those dead…
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Raptor Wednesday
We were eating dinner in Park Slope, near a known hole-in-the-cornice Kestrel nest site. After dinner, we noticed a Kestrel making sorties for bugs up a side street. The bird returned to this perch twice and was still there as we left the scene.
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Fall-ish
Yesterday was the first day it felt like fall, more than three weeks past the equinox. And then it dropped to 41 overnight. This morning the radiators were gurgling. Locally, not many leaves have turned yet, but these, fallen from a Nyssa sylvatica (Black Gum, Black Tupelo), are in the mood.This Eastern Phoebe was a…
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Familiar Bluet
Enallagma civile, the last damselfly of the year? This picture was taken on 9/24.This one on 10/6: tandem flight and egg-laying in Green-Wood’s Sylvan Water. I assume the larvae will overwinter.
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Some Birds
The Swedish trip recedes swiftly into the past, but digital memory lives on! Here are a few of the birds I managed to get photos of:Great Tit (Parus major) at a Swedish-made bird feeder in the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen. This angle does not show the black streak running down the GT’s breast, so here’s…
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Insects
Harmonia axyridis, the Multi-colored Asian Lady Beetle, is known in the UK as the Harlequin Lady Beetle. “Harlequin” is a better common name than MALB, which is a mouthful and has a whiff of racial baggage to it, particularly when added to invasive. This one was one of two spotted in Denmark, the only lady…
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Bombus Away
After a lingering slog of humidity, things have gotten cooler and drier here in the Borough of Kings. Today’s high is forecast to be 69, not the most optimal for insects. Their season is passing. I saw this bumblebee yesterday working a chicory, of the few flowering plants in Sunset Park now. The bumble was…
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Red Squirrel Alert!
A Eurasian Red Squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) scoping out the scene in Copenhagen’s Assistens Kirkegard (cemetery), where Søren Kierkegaard is buried. There were two; they were pretty camera shy. This squirrel species is wide-spread across Eurasia, but is suffering in the UK from a disease introduced by imported Gray Squirrels from North America. Declines have also…
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Raptor Wednesday at the Movies
The first sight of a church yard in Copenhagen triggered a memory that bloomed in Sweden. I’d seen such graveyards before: the gravel plots fenced in by foot-high hedges rigorously trimmed, the raked patterns in the somber gray sand. Very orderly, compact, clean. It was all in the 1999 Swedish film Falkens öga/Kestrel’s Eye, about…
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Muddy Duck
Ah, the White-breasted… wait a minute?Who the devil is this? These large, distinctive ducks were spotted all over Copenhagen.Took me a minute to figure out what I was looking at, later confirmed by our bird guide in Sweden. What do you think?
Backyard and Beyond 