Fieldnotes
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Fishy Indigestibles
A pellet of fish tiny fish bones. (1924 silver dollar is 1.5″ in diameter.) There were a few on this bench, the same location I found some a few years ago. Not much mystery here: a male Belted Kingfisher has been snapping up tiny fish here, off and on, for weeks. Check out also the…
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Raptor Wednesday
Aren’t you glad you’re not an inch tall, or, conversely, that these things aren’t forty feet tall? This young Red-tailed hawk, the same bird seen nearly an hour earlier, flew into a corner of Green-Wood that is sometimes patrolled by a male American Kestrel. The falcon was there! He set up a hue and cry,…
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Indigestible
Looks like feathers. Some bone fragments. These are pellets hawked up by various birds. The above three photos were all taken in rather close proximity, but under different trees. Examples in the third picture were found all bunched up like this. Too small for Great Horned, too big for Saw-Whet. Owl pellets are the most…
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Didelphis virginiana
How sad to run across an opossum stiff with death and cold. This one was the size of a very large cat. I hope he or she was a great fount of progeny. The tail is finely haired. Magnificent and remarkable creatures with bad press. They snarl when cornered, they’re vicious in a cage. But…
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Superb Owl Sunday
The Blue Jays bought me here. This was a sighting in late September. In October, I found a single Great Horned Owl feather, its down all entangled so that it flew like a flag. Imagine, at night, the silent sweep of one of these large birds while the traffic grunts and vomits a few hundred…
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Homero Gómez González
At home, the oligarchs poison us slowly, with more shit in the food supply, more sewage in the waterways, more pollution in the air, water, and soil. Trump and his monstrous allies stand for profits over people, very much at the expense of our lives. (Their cultists, the Fascist Fifth of the population, are seemingly…
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More Bits, More Pieces
Eumenes wasp mud nest pots. There were a dozen of these mantid egg cases in this patch of Rhus aromatica, the same spot I found the mud nests in. If there were sheep about, I say this was a bit of wool with a medium-sized marble in it. I am, however, hoping it’s some insect…
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Bits and Pieces
Jawbones. On iNaturalist, someone thinks these are Brown Rat. The coin is an inch in diameter. Same coin, different jaw. I pulled out the incisor: rodent teeth keep growing. 6mm long claws extracted from a pellet. Owls swallow everything. I’ve seen our local American Kestrels choked down the entire legs of their bird prey, talons…
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Raptor Wednesday
Squirrels and Blue Jays were in an uproar about this young Red-tailed Hawk. And when this mature Cooper’s Hawk landed briefly on the other side of the same tree, the mammal-avian alarms went haywire. Since I’d used a tree as a blind to get closer for the shots of the Red-tail, I couldn’t see what…
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Catalpa
Hey, wait a minuted! It turns out I’d never seen a catalpa seed before. The pods, sure, all the time, but always already empty. Both the Northern and Southern catalpas are found in our region. They also hybridize. And there are a number of other species in the Catalpa genus that have gotten around as…
Backyard and Beyond 