mthew
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Red-breasted Nuthatch Day
Very determined is this bird. The typical procedure is to score a seed from some thick evergreen, fly it to a nearby deciduous tree with ample branches and gnarly bark, and attack!Then repeat.But you know what else is important?Water.Happy New Year.
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Red-breasted Nuthatch Eve
If you look closely and follow a line extending from the sharp bill of this Red-breasted Nuthatch, you’ll see a dark round seed, just a tad larger than the bird’s eye, hatched into a crevice of bark.Whack goes the chisel-bill!
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Raptor Us
As I turned the corner onto 41st Street across from the park, preparing for the hike up the moraine, I noticed a big bird take off from the slope above the park’s retaining wall. It was a Red-tailed Hawk, of course, and it landed in a London plane tree anchored in the sidewalk. Crossing the…
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Barking Up What Tree?
The pictures of this tree’s bark this morning stirred up some interest, so: here are some more clues.Winter tree ID: I took a whole class once, but I’m stumped here.
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Bark
Another tree I can’t quite identify. Click for larger views of barky life.
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Sap Sucker II
Back to this… birch?This time — and it was the same time as yesterday’s Tufted Titmouse, give or take a minute — a White-breasted Nuthatch is partaking of the sapsucker holes.In Green-Wood Cemetery at this time of year, you can go a good distance without seeing any birds. But when you come across them, the…
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Sap Sucker I
Whatever this tree is, it had been roundly tapped by Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers over the years.And the little wells of sap attract others. For instance:Here’s a Tufted Titmouse in early December. Check out those tiny toes getting footholds in the bark, in the sap holes. Tomorrow: another visitor at the same time.
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Raptor Wednesday
This Red-tailed Hawk sailed past me to land further up a slope in Green-Wood. Had it captured something? As you probably know, most raptor strikes come up empty. But not this time. Was it a thrush?This perch in a pine seemed to be an even better butcher’s block. (It gets gory from here).Visceral even.And within four…
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Melancholy
Bet you’ll miss us when we’re gone…* Dürer, Ionesco, Edinburgh’s Paperback Bookshop… now Brooklyn’s otherwise corporate MetroTech plaza has a rhino, too. A trio of them, to be exact, stacked. The sculpture, “The Last Three,” by Gillie & Marc, represent the last three — now there are two — white rhinos. This is a detail.…
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Mushroom Monday
First, one is noticed under the pine.Then the others. This stray oak leaf looks gigantic next to them. John Adams, of all people, forecasting Trump: “the weakness, the folly, the Pride, the Vanity, the Selfishness, the Artifice, the low craft and meaning cunning, the want of Principle, the Avarice the unbounded Ambition, the unfeeling cruelty.”…
Backyard and Beyond 