Fieldnotes
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Kestrels
This male is a hell of a provider. I’ve seen three feedings per day recently, in which the male will bring prey to a perch, pluck and eat some, and then noisily give to the female. Caught a glimpse of her. She’s coming out of the nest to take food. He has popped into the…
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Portrait of a Kingfisher
Female Belted Kingfisher. I half wondered if the binomial Megaceryle alcyon had anything to do with big hair…. The genus name is from the Greek for “great sea bird,” or a king fisher, if you will. The specific epithet is from a Greek myth: Alcyon mourned so for her drowned husband that the gods turned…
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Raptor Wednesday
Other American Kestrels. Six or seven blocks away from home as the falcon flies is Green-Wood Cemetery. From one corner of the cemetery, you can see the top corner of my apartment building, so naturally I wonder if the #BrooklynKestrels pair have hunted there.This is a male I saw recently in Green-Wood, above Sylvan Water.…
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Springing Forth
One of the diurnal fireflies. Great Egret. This was not a bright day and the bird was far away, but more recently one sailed by in front of the kestrel observatory we call our apartment and the bird’s wings were like clean sheets flapping in the breeze.Mourning Cloaks, Caggage Whites, and possibly one other species…
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Earth Day
I’m a 24/7/365 celebrator of Earth — doubters could start with oxygen — but here, for the official Earth Day, are some of the avian life forms who’ve visited my part of the ol’ oblate spheroid this week.For instance, this Summer Tanager (Piranga rubra) hawking for insects over water for days. Wowza!And this Indigo Bunting…
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The Day in Kestrels
The male has now been spotted on our fire escape three times. The third time he left this corpse, which he later retrieved. House Sparrow, I think: very grey with a feather of rufous or chestnut. It’s dangerous out there! (Four separate bird corpses are pictured in this sequence.) While the male was on the…
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Look What the Wind Blew In
Eastern Phoebe (Sayornis phoebe). Chipping Sparrow (Spizella passerina).Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus).Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias).Palm Warbler (Setophaga palmarum).Green Heron (Butorides virescens). An ornithological note: if you’re like me, you probably learned that few female birds sing. Oops! In about two thirds of songbird species, they actually do. Talk about silencing female voices!
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The Snappers Are Restless
One of the gigantic Chelydra serpentina of Brooklyn.Another? There were at least two big ones in this pond. But note the difference in leech positions. By the way, just look at all the parasitic life-forms latched onto this one’s head and neck! Crowd-sourcing these pictures to Twitter, I found some suggestions that these were Placobdella…
Backyard and Beyond 