Fieldnotes
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Raptor Wednesday
We interrupt our week of small birds with an eater of small birds: a Merlin. In this case, though, this small falcon was being harried by Blue Jays.Which meant lots of noise, almost all of it from the screeching jays.
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Red-breasted Nuthatch Day
Very determined is this bird. The typical procedure is to score a seed from some thick evergreen, fly it to a nearby deciduous tree with ample branches and gnarly bark, and attack!Then repeat.But you know what else is important?Water.Happy New Year.
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Red-breasted Nuthatch Eve
If you look closely and follow a line extending from the sharp bill of this Red-breasted Nuthatch, you’ll see a dark round seed, just a tad larger than the bird’s eye, hatched into a crevice of bark.Whack goes the chisel-bill!
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Raptor Us
As I turned the corner onto 41st Street across from the park, preparing for the hike up the moraine, I noticed a big bird take off from the slope above the park’s retaining wall. It was a Red-tailed Hawk, of course, and it landed in a London plane tree anchored in the sidewalk. Crossing the…
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Bark
Another tree I can’t quite identify. Click for larger views of barky life.
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Sap Sucker II
Back to this… birch?This time — and it was the same time as yesterday’s Tufted Titmouse, give or take a minute — a White-breasted Nuthatch is partaking of the sapsucker holes.In Green-Wood Cemetery at this time of year, you can go a good distance without seeing any birds. But when you come across them, the…
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Raptor Wednesday
This Red-tailed Hawk sailed past me to land further up a slope in Green-Wood. Had it captured something? As you probably know, most raptor strikes come up empty. But not this time. Was it a thrush?This perch in a pine seemed to be an even better butcher’s block. (It gets gory from here).Visceral even.And within four…
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Mushroom Monday
First, one is noticed under the pine.Then the others. This stray oak leaf looks gigantic next to them. John Adams, of all people, forecasting Trump: “the weakness, the folly, the Pride, the Vanity, the Selfishness, the Artifice, the low craft and meaning cunning, the want of Principle, the Avarice the unbounded Ambition, the unfeeling cruelty.”…
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Red What?
The red head of the Red-bellied Woodpecker is a bold flag in winter. But it’s not the “Red-headed Woodpecker” because that name goes to another species, which has an entirely red head as an adult, not just this mohawk-like swath of color. This is a male, the color going from the nape to the bill.…
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Raptor Wednesday: Justice Edition
For the last two weeks I’ve been serving on a jury in a murder trial. This was the view from the jury room: downtown Brooklyn, with the dwarfed tower of Borough Hall just visible to the left of the long Supreme Court building in the foreground. The row of buildings from the center to the…
Backyard and Beyond 