Fieldnotes
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Brooklyn’s Grasslands
You can’t see them in this picture, but there are thirty-five or so Horned Lark on the ground here at the northwestern corner of Floyd Bennett Field. One of the few open ground bird species on the East Coast, Eremophilia alpestris breeds at the tundra top of North America. The Lower 48 are their wintering…
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Two Habitats
1.) A Rufus Hummingbird has been hanging out by the entrance to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. This species, Selasphorus rufus, is more generally found in the Northwest and West, so its continued presence in Manhattan since December has been cause for comment. The bird is…
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Complexity
Back from the winter festive season visiting family, and brushes with differing mindsets. One bemoans environmentalism and its -ists, so I ask if he likes to breath. “When we tug on a single thing in nature we find it attached to everything else,” said John Muir. The fact that we, too, are connected, is unfortunately…
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Mortal Foe
Well, it seems it’s finally winter, at least for a day or two. That means cold, just like when I was a boy. Over the weekend we saw a turtle head peeking out of the Lake in Prospect Park. That’s no sign of winter! Two weeks ago, I was battling mosquitos in the tropics of…
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Winter caterpillar
Large Yellow Underwing caterpillar. I took this photo on October 15th in Green-Wood and saved it for the first day of winter to illustrate the insect’s life cycle. I thought October was late in the year, but Noctua pronuba can be active even in the dead of winter, given a thaw. The mature caterpillars can…
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Ivy
A wall of ivy that’s rolled down like a rug ready for storage on a retaining wall of a BQE overpass. Such evergreen thickets are often used by congregations of house sparrows for the night. A host of sparrows is the formal collective noun, but I like congregations because a grouping of sparrows will make…
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December Color
Baldcypress, Taxodium distichum, at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Pop Quiz: The “baldy cypress” is common in its native swamp habitat in the southeastern U.S., and rather less common as a street tree here in NYC. But why, since our streets are only metaphorically swampy — usually — should this species do well here at all? If…
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Autumnal Moths
I am very much looking forward to David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie’s new field guide to moths.
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Museum of Extinct Birds
The Carolina Parakeet, Conuropsis carolinensis, was the only parrot species native to the eastern U.S. It ranged from the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River Valley, and as far west as Colorado; it sometimes made it as far north as Ontario. The last wild bird was thought to have been shot in 1904. The…
Backyard and Beyond 