mthew
-
Sunset Park Elm
A long-shot from the apartment yesterday morning. The night before, Friday, when the snow started, I was looking out the window about 11pm. It was a white night, the lights of the city bouncing down from the low clouds. A large bird came from overhead, just a story or two higher than my fourth floor.…
-
Storm Birds
There’s a surprising amount of bird activity out there. Pigeons are being driven laterally by the wind. An occasional gull is visible in the gull-colored sky. House Sparrows sweep across sidewalks and the gated little yards across the street on the hunt for food. Starlings flocking in a small Chinese Scholar tree gobble the hanging…
-
Passengers
Actually, they’re no longer passengers on this Earth with us. A Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) diorama at the American Museum of Natural History.
-
Snipe
Originally posted on Backyard and Beyond: Everywhere except Reykjavik, on both ends of our Icelandic trip, we had sightings of the common snipe (Gallinago gallinago). This species is not to be confused with the related Wilson’s snipe, which we have in Brooklyn, and which was considered the same species until recently, making the confusion understandable.…
-
Free Malheur NWR
It has now been more than two weeks since a ragtag group of armed men took over buildings at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon. Our nation’s representatives in the west have long been terrorized by a right-wing movement which wants to convert public land to their own profit wholesale. This has been well-funded…
-
And Another Thing
It’s good to be the tallest thing in the neighborhood. Everybody wants to be king of the spire. If you’ve been following the blog, you’ll know the cross atop St. Michael’s at 4th and 42nd is a regular perch for Peregrine falcon(s). My latest sighting was the tail end of a drama: a Peregrine taking…
-
Turf and Owl
I’ve been reading Neil MacGregor’s Germany: Memories of a Nation, a deeply thought-provocking work even with its sprawling and superficial, in the best sense, scope. I wanted to make a note of Dürer’s famous rhinoceros, highlighted in a chapter on the master, in these pages of blog, but a pebble dropped into the mines of…
-
Squirrel Downtime
Two Eastern Grey Squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis) in curious resting positions on branches.
Backyard and Beyond 