mthew
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Balcony Perch
I saw a pair of Pigeons, but my companion saw something else in their general vicinity. We were down below the rise of the Heights in Brooklyn Bridge Park, looking up to where the swells live. The hawk was perched on the top balcony, facing in, but with that wonderfully flexible neck glance backwards and sideways and…
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Stump Flies
If you look closely at yesterday’s pictures of recently stumped trees in Green-Wood, you’ll see a fly on one of them. Here are a few more. Saturday got to 60 degrees or so, but these photos were taken earlier in the day when it was perhaps 50. There didn’t seem to be much in the…
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Hearts of Wood
A number of trees in Green-Wood have been cut down. Looks like a contractor has come through and limbed up some and take out some others. There are a lot of stories to be read in the remaining stumps. This is an older cut. Somebody is using it as a butcher block for acorns.
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Humboldt
Across the street from the southeastern corner of the Museum of Natural History is the Naturalists’ Gate to Central Park. Besides it is this massive bust of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the great German explorer, naturalist, and geographer. The bronze was unveiled on the 100th anniversary of his birth as part of the world-wide celebrations of his…
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Winter Baby
Originally posted on Backyard and Beyond: They say that the long and winding road leads to your door.Or, should you be going the other way, which is generally the way to start a walk, walking out that door, say, on a fine evening between four and six, one step after another, the road goes ever…
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The Narrowest Edge
“We so easily settle for the diminished world around us, a world that, in terms of the richness and abundance of plant and animal life, may be a mere 10 percent of what once was. Unaware of what we have lost, we can’t imagine what we might restore, and instead, we argue over how many…
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Home Turf
The block across the street is made up of yellow brick bow-fronted row houses which are, thankfully for my view from the 4th floor, only 2.5 stories high. One of these houses has a cage frame for an air-condidtioner in its second story window. There’s no air-conditioner, but there is what looks like some kind of plastic…
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Eggs
The other day I was rinsing off some organic tatsoi from Florida and found this egg clump. Tatsoi is a brassica — jeez, what isn’t this time of year? — so I compared these to pictures of Cabbage White (Pieris rapae) eggs, on the off-chance… but no dice. If anybody recognizes them, give a holler.
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Eagle Resurrection
Originally posted on Backyard and Beyond: Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) over Croton Point Park. Hugely perched in trees, wheeling in the air on their seven-feet wingspans, primary feathers sticking out like fingers, or powerfully, but not super-speedily, rowing through the air. I was reminded of the giant eagles in Tolkien, deus-ex-machina-ing over and over again…
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Smoke On The Water
Yesterday’s bone-cold weather created an interesting phenomenon that made it look like the Upper Harbor was smoking. The combination of very cold air, zero on the Fahrenheit scale and feeling even colder because of the wind, and the warmer water made for a kind of low level fog clumping and billowing on the blue harbor.…
Backyard and Beyond 