Fieldnotes

I spotted twenty-nine Monk Parrots yesterday, several blocks from their colony. They were eating the buds of callery pear trees. A lot of the buds were clipped off and fell. The birds descended to the road to eat them.

A half-dozen tiny-billed Common Redpolls energetically flitted all over this American sweetgum the other day in Green-Wood. Not much bigger than the sweetgum pods themselves, the birds needled out the tiny seeds within. I haven’t seen one of these boreal finches in many a year. With the light and the pond, over which this sweetgum…

Look out, sweetgum balls!

Those may be Downy Woodpecker holes in this hanging dead branch. Cooper’s Hawk at the top of this mass of pigeons. Common Raven flying with nesting material, twig, broken off a tree about a block from this blog’s command post. Other member of the pair hung around in the tree for a while before dropping…

Same Cooper’s? Could be. First picture from last Wednesday, second picture a day earlier. (We had a good bit of snow.) Definitely not the same Cooper’s. This is an adult is perched on the same fire escape as the juvenile pictured first above and below. This fire escape is a few yards (quite literally back…

A cloacal-eye view, so to speak, of Tufted Titmouse. What’s with the tail? There’s some suggestion on the innernets that this results from cramped overnight roosting conditions, where several birds will pile up in a hole in a tree to huddle for warmth. The brighter White-throated Sparrows (see below) usually get all the attention. Same…

Immature Herring. Great Black-backed Gull with female Red-breasted Merganser in the background.Great Black-backed is the largest gull species in the world. The Herring Gull is pretty good sized, too, and here one dominates the surround Ring-billed Gulls. Ring-billed are the most common gull species here. *** CVE (countering violent extremism) programs have tended to center…

The Northern Quahog (Mercenaria mercenaria) is damn good eating, although I’m not sure the radioactive etc. toxins of Dead Horse Bay are the best sauce. Dropped onto the exposed bricks, glass, and pottery shards of the mid-century midden so they crack open, the clams are then feasted upon, if they’re not stolen by other gulls.

A young Bald Eagle over Floyd Bennett Field recently. Red-tailed Hawks over Green-Wood. Here are three of the four seen at the same time. Cooper’s on the solar building. American Kestrel tuning in.