mthew
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The Fields of Sweetgum
Just a part of one of the large spreads of fallen Sweetgum balls I’ve ever come across recently. Not pictured here are the Dark-eyed Juncos that were taking advantage of the windfall. The tiny Liquidambar styraciflua seeds are a big source of winter food for birds.
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Nasty Circle: What’s Old is New Again
I once had the privilege of touring the attic of the American Museum of Natural History. In the mid-90s there were still shelves upon shelves of model heads up there illustrating the supposed “racial” categories of a century ago. Back in that era of eugenics, an Italian was considered to be of a different race…
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Sturnus vulgaris
When Pluto was “demoted” as a planet I was taken aback by the reaction. It was like people had lost an invisible childhood friend. But science changes, refines, and, yes, overturns old verities, and this is process is much more interesting to me than a sentimental connection to something learned in childhood. Contra that guy…
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Boots For Scale
I wear a 9/9.5. These are rabbit prints. There were some other curious prints in the snow on the frozen Bronx River that I could not figure out. No tail, as in a muskrat, and although rather canine-looking, (but too big for fox?) they looked too close together for coyote. Perhaps a cat whose prints,…
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Raptor Wednesday
Looking northwest-ishly from the View From The Moraine towards Governor’s Island, we see two brick smokestacks rising from the plains of Industry City. They are that massive facility’s power plant’s exhaust funnels. The taller one works: steam (and what else?) rises from it night and day, except sometimes not on weekends. I’ve often wondered if…
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A Return Engagement
The great elm of Sunset Park on a recent wintery day. To track this tree over a year, I photographed it roughly every month from November 2015 to the end of 2016.
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Mimus polyglottos
And who hasn’t felt the side-eye of a Northern Mockingbird greedily claiming all the little pears of winter? Different day, same patch. A different tree this time: those red linden branchlets! Same bird? In this case, it was much colder so there some puffed-up feather action here. Great insulation, feathers. I wore down myself yesterday.
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Tree Omnibus
The trees are singing. If only we would listen. Tolkien suggested it might be quite hard to hear them, since they sing on a whole different time scale. David George Haskell is listening with microphones and an acute biologist’s senses. The Songs of Trees was one of last year’s best naturalist books, beautifully written and…
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Pulp Nonfiction
All right, then, I will admit an obsession with these Bald-faced Hornet nests. The scraps of paper blown down from one that I bought home recently revealed at least two tiny invertebrate species making their home there after the wasps were undone by the year. At 10x magnification, you really begin to see the tiny…
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Bark
Street signs. Wrought iron. Chain link. The trees don’t care. They will absorb the things in their way. Here’s a local Empress Tree (Paulownia tomentosa ), pressing through some fencing as the bark alligators in remembrance.
Backyard and Beyond 