mthew
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Autumnal Thoughts
Forests are fragmented, wetlands are drained, the great anthropogenic extinction continues. Insect populations are plummeting. Life itself is under assault in the name of capital. Meanwhile, botanical gardens, of all places, are clear-cutting woodlands for parking lots. And of course, gangster oligarchs run riot across the planet, polluting and looting between occasional bouts of pissing…
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Ah, nuts!
“Filbert? Filbert? Where is that boy?”Turkish filbert or hazelnut (Corylus colurna). Shell and two halves of another. The frilly husk, or bristly involucre to the hort pros, of the nut dries out to a gnarly, tentacled beauty. I was late this year and found only two twisted, nut-less examples under this Green-Wood tree, so here’s…
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Detente
Is this an art project on Green-Wood’s Valley Water? * It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? It’s not like ignorance and stupidity are new enemies. They may be the oldest enemies of all. But ignorance (not knowing) and stupidity (not wanting to know) are incredibly empowered now and very readily exploitable by forces directly affecting…
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Flinty
The National Museum of Copenhagen is filled with flint tools from the pre-metal millennia. This stuff makes for very sharp edges. The stone of Europe’s Stone Age, flint stones were also used to start fires and spark guns into the 19th century. The Baltic beaches were littered with nodules of this dark chert. It’s a…
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Raptor Wednesday
A couple of species of raptors have been called Chicken Hawks, so the name isn’t very definitive.I’m using it here for this Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii) because there are actually chickens in a yard next to this building in the Bronx. Roosters, too (technically illegal because of the noise, but law isn’t much enforced in…
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After the Woodcock Storm
On Saturday, I couldn’t help flushing more than two dozen “mud bats,” or American Woodcock (Scolopax minor), in Green-Wood Cemetery during an hour’s walk. On Sunday, although we spent nearly three hours there and covered a much greater extent of the grounds, we only only found three. One of them, though, allowed us to observe…
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Conundrum
The old philosophical question, “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” can perhaps be re-written as “if a woodlands is clearcut for a parking lot, will anyone notice”? * There was a shopping mall Now it’s all covered in flowers … Once…
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Woodcock Moon
According to a tweet from a British wildlife trust, November’s first full moon is known as a Woodcock Moon because it “coincides with an influx of these nocturnal woodlanders.” Well, yesterday, on this side of the Atlantic, following Friday night’s full moon, Green-Wood Cemetery was positively timberdoodle-riffic. I counted, conservatively, twenty-eight of the buffy orange-bellied…
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Yesterday, there were half a dozen mantids in the asters on Pier 6. It was short-sleeve weather, but Honeybees were the only obvious prey. There were, however, a pair of Monarch wings tucked away in the folds of the flower stems, suggesting someone snagged a butterfly. (Sighted about ten living Monarchs yesterday fluttering and gliding…
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Small Kites on the Loose
Surely the last butterflies of the year, these pics from last week? No, I saw two Monarchs heading south yesterday. This is so weird, the weird that is the new normal in the global disruptions of radical climate change. All the Monarchs we’ve seen so late into this fall? Probably not a good thing: they…
Backyard and Beyond 