Fieldnotes
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Raptor Wednesday
What a racket! Twice recently I’ve come across a storm of American Robins sounding their strident chip alarms. A perching Red-tailed Hawk was the source of the commotion both times. In this second case, a buzzing Northern Mockingbird was in on it, too, repeatedly razzing, sometimes even clipping, the big raptor. When the hawk flew…
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Lichen
Lichens, like other lifeforms, are sensitive to air pollution. So the relative scrubbing of the air in the last few generations — before the Republican counter-revolution — has brought back lichen communities to NYC. Cemeteries are the one of best places to see lichens because they don’t have the road traffic of the streets and…
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Start Your Week Right
An Eastern Kingbird perching near invasive honey bee hives.But not hunting.Doing… some calisthenics?Whoa… Forcing up a pellet…With that done, the bird returned to zooming amongst the bees.This is a wad of exoskeleton bits. (Much like good french fries, insects are crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside, but instead of a surface layer…
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Topography
“Brooklyn with its hills.” “The ample hills of Brooklyn.” The view from the morainal hill. Here’s Whitman again, talking of the borough I’ve lived in for a quarter century. Hills? You ask quizzically if you’ve never walked up Union Street from Carroll Gardens across the Gowanus Canal up to Grand Army Plaza. Whitman was a…
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Odes
Spot-winged Glider, in a rare perch. They can spend hours in the air.Blue Dasher male, quite common and frequently perched.Eastern Pondhawk male.Male Painted SkimmerThis damselfly is peculiar. I can find no matching ID for it, and both iNaturalist and bugguide.net remain silent to my queries. I think it may be a maturing andromorph (that is,…
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Recent Birds
Eastern Willet.Red-winged Blackbird female.Tree Swallow male.The male was perched above this nest box with a female boldly covering the entrance.Red-breasted Mergansers.Yellow-crowned Night-heron. House Wren.
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American Robin
May 8th. May 9th. May 15th. There’s a fourth in the back right. On May 16, the nest was empty. Young American Robins leave the nest before they can fly. People sometimes find them and think they’ve fallen out and need help. But they are fine. Unless the cat is out, in which case put…
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Buds
Liriodendron tulipifera. And something in the Theaceae family… *** As you know, the well of the federal judiciary is being poisoned by reactionary ideologues, shoveled in by Mitch McConnell’s corrupt control of the Senate as part of the culmination of the Federalist Society’s long effort to return control of the law to the corporations and…
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Outtakes
A really good photograph of a bird is somewhat deceiving. The human eye rarely has it so good. And this time of year, with migrating songbirds acrobatically flitting about in thickly leafed-out trees, spotting and tracking a bird is quite a challenge. Ditto the photographing. The long lenses and flashes necessary for money shots, if…
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Darning (?)
Common Green Darner dragonflies (Anax junius). This is a migratory species, one of the first seen in the spring and one of the last seen in the fall as they move up and down North America. Male is grasping the female as she oviposits, laying her eggs in the lake in Woodlawn Cemetery. Not all…
Backyard and Beyond 