Fieldnotes
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Mocking
Funny: Congress members hiding from the citizenry. Par for the course of the anti-democracy strategy necessary to keep a minority party in the majority. But claiming “paid protestors” are the new “outside agitators”? That’s rich for people who take money from outside their districts, states and even, via the Chamber of Commerce’s money-laundering shell-games, nation.…
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Breaking the Lock
Rebecca Solnit’s “Tyranny of the Minority” in the March Harper’s nails it: “Republicans’ furious and nasty war against full [democratic] participation has taken many forms: gerrymandering, limiting early voting, reducing the number of polling places, restricting third-party voter registration, and otherwise disenfranchising significant portions of the electorate. Subtler yet no less effective have been their…
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Sturnus vulgaris
The view from the moraine recently. Here’s another view: ten things you can do to make Trump toast. (We can hardly wait for his resounding condemnation by history, after all.) Beyond the usual pressure, constant pressure on reps of all parties, I for one was intrigued by the notion of becoming involved at the county political…
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Twiggy
The twigs right now! The twigs! Green, red, orange, brown. Spring is coiled for the spring. This is our old friend Liriodendron tulipifera. Look at those leaf scars! The bundle scars, too, are nice and obvious. In the Native Flora in Winter course I just took at NYBG, some species’ bundle scars were damned hard…
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Raptor Wednesday
See me?Well, I don’t want to be seen. Speaking of being seen! There are lots of elections this year, and although the Republican anti-democracy campaign plows full speed ahead, their nasty little oligopoly isn’t here yet.
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Common Goldeneye
You can almost see the golden eye from here. You can certainly see the white spot on the cheek of this male Bucephala clangula. I don’t see these often: they do not favor the harbor. There were a few dozen off Hunter Island in the Bronx, the western end of Long Island Sound, and the…
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Rings
Just about the entire time I’ve lived in New York City. This was a big fat Red Oak. I will miss it. My birthday falls on Not My President’s Day. Perfect!
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Swamp
What an unfortunate metaphor “draining the swamp” is. We need all the swamp we can get. Here’s a Swamp Sparrow (Melospiza georgiana). This species has longer legs than its cousins (the Song Sparrow is in the same genus), the better for wading. But this particular bird was tucked away in a bit of rather dry…
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Thoreau Thursday
The purple, duck-billed buds of Liriodendron tulipifera. These are just over 2cm long and were taken from some recent windfall branches. Thoreau seems to have become acquainted with “tulip trees” on Staten Island, where he lived from May-December of 1843, having gone there to tutor Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother’s children. I read in one source…
Backyard and Beyond 