Fieldnotes
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Trick
Those fake cobwebs some people insist on garbaging their homes with this time of year turn out to be as effective as real cobwebs in trapping dust, bits of leaves, and, as I noticed on Congress St. the other day, a dozen wasps.Vespula maculifrons, the Eastern Yellowjacket. Black antennae, remember, are good for IDing the…
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Early Autumn
Yellow-rumped warblers, catbirds, hermit thrushes, various sparrows, honey bees, bumblebees, large milkweed bugs, and one lone dragonfly, amid the seedheads, drooping stalks, and last hurrah of blooms.
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Peregrine
Storm King Mountain, not quite at peak fall color on Sunday. This picture was from atop Little Stony Point, which is just north of Cold Spring, NY, beneath the better known Bull Mountain (Mt. Taurus). Granite used to be shipped from here to the city to build little things like the Brooklyn Bridge. While facing…
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Four October Butterflies
On Friday at Fort Tilden, the sun was bright when I got there but a cold front moved in from the northwest as I stood atop the hawk watch platform. These were all seen while the sun was still bright.Monarchs (Danaus plexippus) predominated, still, floating along the coast towards the south. A sulphur, probably Clouded…
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Hawk Watch
Looking northwest towards Gotham-Metropolis; the birds come cruising along from the right. It’s no Hawk Mountain or Veracruz, Mexico, where thousands of North America’s Broad-winged hawks squeeze by on their way south, but I’ve never been to those places, and home is where the raptor is. Or at least just passing through, following the coast…
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More, please
Like tracks into the future, irrigation lines underline the new plantings at Pier 5, Brooklyn Bridge Park.
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High Gloss Lady
My “Year of the Ladybug” continues. Or, should I say, Year of the Aphids? Since it is the aphids, those little buggers, who have ushered in the ladies. This glossy creature is the Polished Lady Beetle, Cycloneda munda, a species new to me.Also known commonly as the Red Lady Beetle and the Immaculate — that…
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High tide
Most of the high tide trash here in the corner of the Brooklyn Bridge Park salt marsh is made up of the tops of plastic bottles. What a fine place to be reminded of Brooklyn-raised Barry Commoner’s four laws of ecology: everything is connected; everything has to go somewhere; nature knows best; there is no…
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Prospect Park
The Upper Pool is just starting to blush with the coming of fall. A walk through the park yesterday. We saw: Wood Duck, Mallard, Red-tailed Hawk, Rock Pigeon, Mourning Dove, Chimney Swift, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Downy Woodpecker, Hairy Woodpecker, Northern Flicker, American Kestrel, Blue Jay, Black-capped Chickadee, Red-breasted Nuthatch, White-breasted Nuthatch, Brown Creeper, House Wren, Carolina…
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Early Fall
Yesterday morning around 10, it was under 60F and cloudy. The bumblebees were not quite warmed up. Some didn’t move at all, others were quite sluggish. Burly little things, with lots of muscle, which is one of the reasons they are one of the first flying bugs in the spring. They can warm themselves up…
Backyard and Beyond 