mthew
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Blueberry Digger
Blueberry Digger Bee/Habropoda laboriosa hard at work not on blueberry flowers, rare around here, but on Japanese Andromeda/Pieris japonica. This bee is reminiscent of the Eastern Carpenter Bee, but has a long tongue so can enter these flowers from the top, as it were, while the relatively small-tongued ECB, which is a much larger bee…
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Kestrels Update
There’s a new female American Kestrel in the local mix. This one isn’t banded, has heavy markings, and, most notably, a tail that looks like it went through the wringer. Let’s call her Tangle-tail, a designation that will fall out with molting. I’ve seen her recently in Green-Wood (what would be roughly 6th Ave &…
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Kentucky Coffeetree
The roasted seeds of Gymnocladus dioicus were used by settler-colonialists to make an ersatz coffee. Their descendants having given the keys to a monster bent on destroying the nation, we may be headed back to that. If you clean the green goo off and polish these with your palm sweat, they turn into cool thingamajigs…
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Return to the Spring Beauties
The pinker ones are more photogenic, but any population of Claytonia virginica will have a range of color-forms.
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Bristles
I just noticed this underwing blue… …but the ostensible reasons for this post are the close-ups I managed to get of the feathery bristles around this (very obliging) Phoebe’s bill.
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Raptor Wednesday
Ten years ago, I saw my first Green-Wood Cemetery Bald Eagle. Not over the cemetery, but perched, briefly, on a pine within it. The bird flew when the limb it was one broke off. I’ve seen a few more since. Last Tuesday, I saw two together for the first time. I followed them around for…
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More Squirrel Tuesday
I found this Gray Squirrel a few minutes after spotting the Groundhog I posted pictures of yesterday. Later, looking in an old guidebook to North American mammals, I noted that Groundhogs are in the squirrel family, Sciuridae. In fact, they are the biggest of our squirrels. Humph!
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Mammal Monday
This Groundhog’s den is near Sophie Calle’s Here Lies the Secrets of The Visitors of Green-Wood Cemetery, which lets people write down and slip their secrets into an underground vault. Making this the Woodchuck Who Knew Too Much?
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Hearts of Wood
Some sprouts at the base of a mature linden/Tilia were cut off recently. And while we’re on the topic, this is the big bole of a Beech.
Backyard and Beyond 