February 2020
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Sunday
For the third year in a row, American Kestrels are in the ‘hood! A male has been around all winter, spotted almost every day. But lately a female has appeared. Copulation was observed on 1/23 on a roof pipe just to the right of this chimney pot. No sign of a female again until this…
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Birds At Last!
Green-Wood has been virtually empty of birds this winter, but last weekend I came across a bundle of them all in the same patch. Flock yes! Brown Creeper, first sighting this winter. Golden-crowned Kinglet. Spotted a Ruby Crowned elsewhere as well. Not one but two Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers on the same trunk. Two Northern Flickers. Only…
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More Galls
I found a mother-of-gall tree! A red oak, Quercus rubra, in Green-Wood. This tree was probably brought in as a sapling a few years ago. I wonder where it was raised? Could it be that the gall-making species came in with the tree, as we’ve seen with lichens transported into the city on saplings destined…
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Fishy Indigestibles
A pellet of fish tiny fish bones. (1924 silver dollar is 1.5″ in diameter.) There were a few on this bench, the same location I found some a few years ago. Not much mystery here: a male Belted Kingfisher has been snapping up tiny fish here, off and on, for weeks. Check out also the…
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Raptor Wednesday
Aren’t you glad you’re not an inch tall, or, conversely, that these things aren’t forty feet tall? This young Red-tailed hawk, the same bird seen nearly an hour earlier, flew into a corner of Green-Wood that is sometimes patrolled by a male American Kestrel. The falcon was there! He set up a hue and cry,…
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Indigestible
Looks like feathers. Some bone fragments. These are pellets hawked up by various birds. The above three photos were all taken in rather close proximity, but under different trees. Examples in the third picture were found all bunched up like this. Too small for Great Horned, too big for Saw-Whet. Owl pellets are the most…
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Didelphis virginiana
How sad to run across an opossum stiff with death and cold. This one was the size of a very large cat. I hope he or she was a great fount of progeny. The tail is finely haired. Magnificent and remarkable creatures with bad press. They snarl when cornered, they’re vicious in a cage. But…
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Superb Owl Sunday
The Blue Jays bought me here. This was a sighting in late September. In October, I found a single Great Horned Owl feather, its down all entangled so that it flew like a flag. Imagine, at night, the silent sweep of one of these large birds while the traffic grunts and vomits a few hundred…
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Homero Gómez González
At home, the oligarchs poison us slowly, with more shit in the food supply, more sewage in the waterways, more pollution in the air, water, and soil. Trump and his monstrous allies stand for profits over people, very much at the expense of our lives. (Their cultists, the Fascist Fifth of the population, are seemingly…
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Too Soon
*** By the title, I originally meant that these warm winters are disrupting phenology. But the news keeps crashing in. Republicans have made overt their war on our democracy. Their actions are most strongly felt at the border, where uniformed goons separate men and women, families from children, not unlike the Gestapo or SS. What…
Backyard and Beyond 