Backyard and Beyond

From all over, but mostly from the window. Here’s a Cooper.Kestrel on the same fire escape, with prey.Cooper again, another day.A Kestrel several blocks away, atop Sunset Park HS. I always glance up here when entering or exiting the 36th Street subway station.Red-tailed Hawk with full crop.

In #BrooklynKestrel news, a male was seen regularly from the window for most of January. A female has been seen locally too, perching on favored spots used by last year’s couple: TV antenna, chimney pot, roof pipe. While on the antenna, she called several times. Another day, from her perch on the solar building, she went after what I assumed must have been a Cooper perched on the other side of the building. From a hover, she plummeted down, swooping back up, and dive again, three times in total. Further down in the flatlands, I watched a Kestrel go after a Red-tailed. Fierce little birds.

The second half of February has been sparser for local Kestrel sightings. A male occasionally on the big antenna at 40th St.

Ripped from the headlines:yesterday, we saw a pair of Bald Eagles mating on Staten Island. It was at some distance so we couldn’t hear them, but we could see their big bills open and knew it was noisy.

Back to that article I think folks should be talking about:

“Drawing reasonable inferences from current patterns, we can predict that a hundred years from now, the Earth may be inhabited by between 6 and 8 billion people, very few of whom live in extreme poverty, 70%–90% of whom live in towns and cities, and nearly all of whom participate in a globalized, market-based economy. It is not inconceivable that two centuries from now, the population could be half what it is today and the long-cherished goals of a world where people respect and care for nature may be realized, especially if we act now to foster this eventuality. We argue that these gains might be accomplished not through draconian population policies or ongoing perpetuation of poverty, but rather through the social dynamics of cities. Success is by no means inevitable, but as others have observed (e.g., Ausubel 2000), acting to accelerate these dynamics now offers the best opportunity humanity will ever have to recover nature on a global scale.”