mthew

In roughly age/plumage order, younger to older. Incidentally, you don’t need a weatherperson to tell you which way the wind is blowing if you have gulls around.

Common Drone Fly on Hoop Daffodil. Slurping up pollen from an anther. The flower’s stigma can be seen between the fly’s legs. Close-up of fly/pollen interface. (Common Drone is something of a bee-mimic.) A real bee, albeit a farm animal. Honey Bee on another Hoop daffy. Stigma reaching out further than the anthers. She’s packed…

Two Coopers Hawks, one with a pigeon. The bird with the prey brought it down to the solar panels and feasted for an hour. The feasting bird can just be glimpsed through the parapet fire-escape cut. There was a third accipiter in the air (to the left) in the background while this was going on.…

The False Milkweed Bug is so named because it once confused with the Small Milkweed Bug/Lygaeus kalmii, but it turned out to not feed on Milkweeds. False Sunflowers/Heliopsis helianthoides are their food of choice. Saw several a week ago at Brooklyn Bridge Park where False Sunflowers are planted, but… what are they feeding on this…

Spring’s onslaught means I’m inevitably behind in these posts. These Trembling Aspen/Populus tremuloides catkins were popping a week ago and… …being dropped from above. Black-capped Chickadees and Tufted Titmouses were eating them (and/or insects within?).

Same bird; photos taken over a minute and a half.

(As always, clicking a photograph here will enlarge it.)

Two frisky young Red-tails. A few minutes later, there were six hawks in the air above me over Green-Wood. All seemed to be Red-tails. There was also a Turkey Vulture. It was actually chased away by one of the RTs.

Some pigeon-plucking sights.

As a large adult female (presumably, because it seemed larger) Red-tailed Hawk perched above the Dell Water… A bird about half a year old flew back and forth stalking the various bird feeders set up there. Well, yes, the hawk did lumber-dive the short distance towards the American Goldfinch, who flicked away effortlessly.