mthew

Bumblebee-like, but smaller (this time of year) and faster… And these white facial markings. This looks like a male Blueberry Digger Bee/Hapropoda laboriosa. Seems to have bitten onto leaf to groom with all six legs in action.

An unusual NYC bird, since they tend to be more southerly. I had never seen one here in the city before this. At Brooklyn Bridge Park last weekend.

The drive-by edition. American Kestrel female photographed over 4th Avenue through windshield. Peregrine atop Gill Hodges Bridge, through windshield. Nesting Osprey pair at sports fields at Floyd Bennett Field. Picture through open window of moving car. Same day, further inland at Avenue P, through windshield again.

The Oystercatchers, that is.

A pair of Piping Plovers/Charadrius melodus on the urban beach. Federally listed as endangered on Great Lakes beaches and threatened on the East Coast beaches, these tiny shorebirds are almost but not quite hidden among the broken surf clams and civilizational detritus. These two are behind stringy fencing. There are a lot of signs, but…

Preen. Yawn. Itch. Itch again.

Answer tomorrow.

Mourning cloaks must have been sumptuous to have inspired the common name of this butterfly. These overwinter locally, tucking themselves into bark crevices and the like. Ubiquitous Cabbage Whites making more Cabbage Whites. American Ladies were fluttering ashore along the Rockaway Peninsula on Monday, the warmest day of the year so far. They move up…

The crazy sound of summer: Laughing Gulls overhead along the city’s edges. And sometimes a bit further inland, as here where some rat-fancier has dumped a huge amount of old bread on a traffic island on Avenue U.

My third Osprey sighting of the year, flying above the eclipse crowd at Green-Wood. The best place to see these fish-eating birds in Brooklyn is at Marine Park, where two nest platforms are occupied again this year. The one pictured above has been occupied for many breeding years. This one has been unoccupied for years,…