mthew
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Watering Hole in the Ice
Beckett says somewhere that we spend our life “trying to bring together in the same instant a ray of sunshine and a free bench.” For birds in winter, it’s an open bit of water. The sunshine is gravy. Back in October I spied on the birds bathing under the little weeping variety of bald cypress…
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The Threats to the Insects
A special feature in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a series of articles on the global decline of insects in the Anthropocene. “Nature is under siege,” begins the introduction to the gathered paper of a symposium sponsored by the Entomological Society of America in November, 2019. The threats, short-handed as…
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Raptor Wednesday
Three days of pair-bonding for the American Kestrels. No copulation seen; it’s a bit early for that. One morning a Cooper’s Hawk chased them from this chimney pot. I was alerted because of the kestrel screaming. The big orange boat is one the Staten Island Ferry fleet.
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Mallards
*** Here’s a year-long time-line of Trump’s incitement of his fascist base, leading up to the putsch attempt. A year seems hardly enough for a man who began his presidential campaign with a racist onslaught and quickly took up the America First Nazi-lovers label; signaled his approval of the murderers in Charlottesville; and ordered his…
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Sounds
There is no silence in Brooklyn. Human noise is constant. Even late at night the nearby highway is a drone of grey noise, and the D train screeches as it rounds the corner. And that’s the quietest time of all. Inside Green-Wood, things are notably improved, buffered, dampened. Even there, though, the sounds of near…
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In Praise of Geography
Tim and Máiréad Robinson earned a living by making maps. Both passed away in the early wave of COVID last spring. They were in their 80s, but god-damn the eugenicist scum who blithely write off “underlying conditions” as an excuse. (This crowd of filth, the base of a GOP lately heard bleating about how divisive…
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Odds And Bobs
It’s Lichen month at the NYC Ecoflora Challenge on iNaturalist. Not a lichen. A dried-out old mushroom. A fresh, glistening young mushroom. Another new-to-me oak gall wasp: Callirhytis clavula in a white oak. Chickadee landing on practically every old Phylloxera aphid gall on this shagbark hickory. As an arboretum, Green-Wood is stuffed with trees, meaning…
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Evidence
Turkish hazel. Swamp white oak. Yew. Silver birch. Adding these to the Caucasian fir on my list of species tapped into by Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers. Here’s one more, but I haven’t figured out what kind of tree this is. None of the above. *** Republicans who are shocked, shocked, that their words and deeds have consequences…
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Something Something
More explorations underneath trees, looking up this time. This Douglas fir is gnarly with what I suppose are cankers. They’re leaking sap. Used to the resiny stickiness of pines, I note that this sap was quite dry. Anyone know the cause? *** When you lift the klan hood off a Republican, you find a brownshirt.
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Raptor Wednesday
I have been seeing, and hearing about other people seeing, members of the the Red-shouldered League all fall. This is unprecedented. Usually, Red-shouldered Hawks (Buteo lineatus) pass over during migration periods. I’ve never seen them consistently here in Brooklyn through the fall and now winter. This youngster was perched on Monday in Green-Wood. (Does this…
Backyard and Beyond 