mthew
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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.”…
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To Bee Or Not To Bee
When Europeans brought their domesticated honeybees to the New World, they joined the 4000 other species of bees all ready here. That’s a lot of different kinds of bees, but the invasive honeybees, the cattle of insects, the serfs of industry, get virtually all the attention. This is a shame. Honeybees are problematic, to say the…
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Red What?
The red head of the Red-bellied Woodpecker is a bold flag in winter. But it’s not the “Red-headed Woodpecker” because that name goes to another species, which has an entirely red head as an adult, not just this mohawk-like swath of color. This is a male, the color going from the nape to the bill.…
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Raptor Wednesday: Justice Edition
For the last two weeks I’ve been serving on a jury in a murder trial. This was the view from the jury room: downtown Brooklyn, with the dwarfed tower of Borough Hall just visible to the left of the long Supreme Court building in the foreground. The row of buildings from the center to the…
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Chickadee-dee-dee
An energetic Black-capped Chickadee barely pausing in action recently.Poecile atricapillus.One Christmas Bird Count a few years back, not a single one was sighted in Brooklyn. These birds are so familiar, especially at bird feeders, that their absence was disconcerting. Thirty-four were counted at this year’s Brooklyn (Kings Co.) CBC. (This one was, however, spotted in…
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The Big Book of Eagles
But let’s start… small: the Pygmy Eagle weights about the same as a pigeon. Whaa-ut? Hieraaetus weiskei is found on New Guinea and some of the surrounding islands. Evolutionary pressures on islands can sometimes result in rather small animals. Interestingly, this species is said to be one of the closest living relatives of the largest…
