Fieldnotes
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Colors of Spring
Redbud. Orange fungus. American robin blue. Grey squirrel (black variant) & magnolia. Burnt orange fungus. Black dog, having a hell of a time trying to get out of the Lullwater.
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Hot Spot
This part of the Ambergill in Prospect Park has become a hot spot for watching birds bathe. I saw my first indigo buntings of the season here this week, and many other species are coming in to dip and shake those tail feathers, including all manner of orioles and warblers. The shallow pools on the…
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Sulphur
A female orange sulphur butterfly, Colias eurytheme, I think, and not a female clouded sulphur, C. philodice, because, although these species are quite similar, this one looks just like the example in Kaufman’s Field Guide to Butterflies of North America. Complicating matters, these two species can hybridize.
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Confessions of a warblerholic
The wood warblers have returned, as they have done for millennia unnumbered. They are coming out of a night sky thick with migrating birds, thickets that show up on Doppler radar like weather patterns, falling on the green islands of the city to eat furiously before catching another tailwind to fly north to breed. And…
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Listening
Last Sunday, I led a group of twenty on what I called the Listening Tour in Prospect Park. The tour was sponsored by Proteus Gowanus, the interdisciplinary gallery and reading room, which is currently hosting an exhibition called “Paradise.” We were in Prospect for the simple reason that it is a paradise of birds. A…
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Shhhh
We are out listening to the heartbeat of paradise this morning. When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see you’re related to everything else alive on this finite planet? Do you see that you are essentially solar powered? Do you see how you exist because of the waste product of…
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BK 4BR Park Vue Fully Stocked
The Nethermead Arches is a great place for wasp condos. The bridge provides protection from the sun and rain, so organpipe mud-dauber wasps, Trypoxylon politum, build their nests upon its vertical surfaces. Each tube here is made up of several separate cells. An egg was laid in each cell with a cache of paralyzed spiders…
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American Chestnut
Until recently, I didn’t know that American chestnut trees, Castanea dentata, were growing in Prospect Park. Turns out some were planted in 2004. Several of these have survived, but, like the 1,400 chestnut trees killed in the park in the early 20th century, they are doomed by the chestnut blight. This fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, was…
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Tick
I found four dog ticks crawling up my legs yesterday. This was a first for me within the bounds of the city. I was at Four Sparrow Marsh on the edge of Brooklyn. (My companion, on the other ankle, found none; maybe because of her wellies or her press pass.) As you can tell from…
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Lost Dogs
Won’t you please help these dogs find new homes with responsible pet owners?Just a small sampling of unleashed dogs in Prospect Park. Some humans continue to flaunt the common sense rules about keeping dogs leashed in all parts of the park except for the Long Meadow, Nethermead, and Peninsula during off-leash hours (9pm-1am & 5am-9am).…
Backyard and Beyond 