Art Culture Politics
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A Cedar Plum
“DID you ever chance to hear the midnight flight of birds passing through the air and darkness overhead, in countless armies, changing their early or late summer habitat? It is something not to be forgotten. A friend called me up just after 12 last night to mark the peculiar noise of unusually immense flocks migrating…
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Dogs of Prospect, Again
I used to spend so much time in Prospect Park! It’s farther away now, but that’s not the reason I’m there so infrequently now. Half a dozen Red-winged Blackbirds were burbling with Spring there the other day. A Song Sparrow was singing, tree buds were clearly on the edge of bursting, mosses waved their tiny…
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Red-tailed Hawk…
Continuing from yesterday… This yearling Red-tailed Hawk, which I’m pretty sure is the same one I’ve seen in this area of Green-Wood repeatedly, had recently eaten something.Swallowed the portion stored in the crop,and excreted.Then it started looking around the neighborhood.Next to this tombstone was an evergreen bush.Hawk just waded into it.And pulled out a dead…
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Pollination Reminder
This Sierra Club lecture on Wednesday looks great: *SIERRA CLUB NEW YORK CITY GROUP SUSTAINABILITY SERIES 2019* *WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 13: BIRDS, BEES AND BUGS KEEP OUR GARDENS HEALTHY* Michael Hagen – Curator of the Rock Garden & Native Plant Garden, NY Botanical Garden Timothy Leslie – Associate Professor, Department of Biology, LIU Brooklyn Heather Liljengren…
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Gendering Birding
Here are some very interesting thoughts on bird names by Rick Wright. In fact, Wright’s blog is full of the fascinating history of birding naming. Yes, fascinating, because names are how we understand the world. So who gives those names is important. Yup: as in all human endeavors, that means politics. Along these lines, Wright…
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So what is the good news in the litany of malignancy? Joshua Tree National Park is seeing vandals destroy the famed trees during Trump’s assault-on-America government shut-down. “Off-road” assholes are ripping up other national parks, too. The Instagram effect of people taking selfies in remote locations is trashing those locations. “Recent housing growth rates are…
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Lord Love A Duck
Have you heard about the HotDuck™? Good gravy — which is probably what it should be served with — there’s been quite a media ballyhoo over a stray male Mandarin Duck that escaped from some farm or zoo somewhere and ended up in Central Park. No fan of zoos, I haven’t seen the bird myself.…
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Carbon Democracy
“Humankind has consumed about two trillion barrels of oil since the rise of the modern petroleum industry in the 1860s. It is worth repeating that burning the first trillion took about 130 years, but we went through the second trillion in only twenty-two years. […] The world’s fossil fuels were formed out of 500 million…
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Melancholy
Bet you’ll miss us when we’re gone…* Dürer, Ionesco, Edinburgh’s Paperback Bookshop… now Brooklyn’s otherwise corporate MetroTech plaza has a rhino, too. A trio of them, to be exact, stacked. The sculpture, “The Last Three,” by Gillie & Marc, represent the last three — now there are two — white rhinos. This is a detail.…
Backyard and Beyond 