December 2018
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Red-breasted Nuthatch Eve
If you look closely and follow a line extending from the sharp bill of this Red-breasted Nuthatch, you’ll see a dark round seed, just a tad larger than the bird’s eye, hatched into a crevice of bark.Whack goes the chisel-bill!
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Raptor Us
As I turned the corner onto 41st Street across from the park, preparing for the hike up the moraine, I noticed a big bird take off from the slope above the park’s retaining wall. It was a Red-tailed Hawk, of course, and it landed in a London plane tree anchored in the sidewalk. Crossing the…
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Barking Up What Tree?
The pictures of this tree’s bark this morning stirred up some interest, so: here are some more clues.Winter tree ID: I took a whole class once, but I’m stumped here.
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Bark
Another tree I can’t quite identify. Click for larger views of barky life.
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Sap Sucker II
Back to this… birch?This time — and it was the same time as yesterday’s Tufted Titmouse, give or take a minute — a White-breasted Nuthatch is partaking of the sapsucker holes.In Green-Wood Cemetery at this time of year, you can go a good distance without seeing any birds. But when you come across them, the…
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Sap Sucker I
Whatever this tree is, it had been roundly tapped by Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers over the years.And the little wells of sap attract others. For instance:Here’s a Tufted Titmouse in early December. Check out those tiny toes getting footholds in the bark, in the sap holes. Tomorrow: another visitor at the same time.
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Raptor Wednesday
This Red-tailed Hawk sailed past me to land further up a slope in Green-Wood. Had it captured something? As you probably know, most raptor strikes come up empty. But not this time. Was it a thrush?This perch in a pine seemed to be an even better butcher’s block. (It gets gory from here).Visceral even.And within four…
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Melancholy
Bet you’ll miss us when we’re gone…* Dürer, Ionesco, Edinburgh’s Paperback Bookshop… now Brooklyn’s otherwise corporate MetroTech plaza has a rhino, too. A trio of them, to be exact, stacked. The sculpture, “The Last Three,” by Gillie & Marc, represent the last three — now there are two — white rhinos. This is a detail.…
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Mushroom Monday
First, one is noticed under the pine.Then the others. This stray oak leaf looks gigantic next to them. John Adams, of all people, forecasting Trump: “the weakness, the folly, the Pride, the Vanity, the Selfishness, the Artifice, the low craft and meaning cunning, the want of Principle, the Avarice the unbounded Ambition, the unfeeling cruelty.”…
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To Bee Or Not To Bee
When Europeans brought their domesticated honeybees to the New World, they joined the 4000 other species of bees all ready here. That’s a lot of different kinds of bees, but the invasive honeybees, the cattle of insects, the serfs of industry, get virtually all the attention. This is a shame. Honeybees are problematic, to say the…
Backyard and Beyond 