mthew

This Scarlet Tanager was just gobbling up flying things. Possibly bees and wasps. This Baltimore Oriole, meanwhile, was finding tidbits in old galls in a Shagbark Hickory.

There may still be openings in my Green-Wood Bugging Out Walk on Sunday. This is aimed for 5-12 year olds and their parents. Molly is leading a Meet Your Green Neighbors walk on the same day, but earlier, and aimed at adults. Above is the first Bald-faced Hornet I’ve seen this year. She was scraping…

10/A pursued by a Fury, or at least, a Common Grackle. This one was way up there, but if you look hard you can see the wide tail band and the dark edges to the wings: Broad-winged Hawk in migration north.

May 8th The beginnings of a Baltimore Oriole woven nest in a London Plane. I’ve noticed that the nests here in Green-Wood are often made up of human-made materials—plastics, ribbons, fibers—and that they don’t break down over the winter—indeed, even several winters—like ones made out of plant materials would. Here, judging by his nearby presence,…

It is the breeding time of year, when smaller birds dare to go after the much bigger, sometimes in teams, other times solo as in this case.

Opening wide before partially submerging, this Double-crested Cormorant snagged breakfast as a swallow zoomed by in the foreground. On the second of two plunges into Prospect Park Lake, this Osprey came up with prey Within one minute along Sylvan Water in Green-Wood, this Great Egret caught one two Bluegills.

Quite a bit of garbage going into this Robin’s nest. Maybe too much? Six days later I walked by again and saw no further evidence of construction. Here’s a more traditional nest, very grassy. We can’t see the mud lining.

*** A reminder that I also write for JSTOR Daily, where recent topics have included possums, rocket sex cults, anointing of kings named Charles, and the strange posthumous career of Albert Einstein’s brain.

The cutting down of this mature Sycamore Maple resulted in a plethora of sap, which in turn feeds a slime flux of incredible colors. This is a fungus, or rather several fungi, including yeasts, and probably some bacterias. (Deer Vomit is the common name for Fusicolla merismoides, which may be a species complex, but there…

All at once, two high-soaring Buteos… …good ol’ 10-A… …and the nest-keeper.