Fieldnotes
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Kestrel Mania, Part XXX
The American Kestrels were extremely busy yesterday morning. During Wednesday’s storm, I saw neither skin nor feather of them, as expected. But the male was out bright and early in the rich tones of dawn on Thursday. He soon flew over to the chimney, and several minutes later the female landed on the nearby roof…
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Dawn Kestrel
Sunrise on the American Kestrel male this morning, a few minutes before he and the female mated on their favorite roof-top pipe.
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Raptor Wednesday
An old Red-tailed Hawk nest being refurbished. Over a couple of weekends, I watched Red-tailed Hawks bringing new sticks to this nest.The last time I was watching, one hawk perched nearby.While this one did all the work. Unseen here are the Blue Jays buzzing the hawk as it scouted a nearby tree for nesting material.…
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Mammal Monday
The front door.Looked too small for a backdoor, so let’s call it a window. (No mammals were woken up for these photos.]
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American Kestrel Update
Tis the season for copulation.Note how the male’s talons are bunched up. He can’t, after all, grab hold of her back with those sharp claws. I noticed this in an Instragramer’s photo of mating Osprey recently, where the scale was rather larger but the principle the same. Bird mating is brief. The balancing act —…
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Anniversary!
I launched this blog on this day in 2010. Good gravy, has it been this long? That was such a red-letter day, I posted twice! So thank you, readers: 182 of you get these posts delivered to your mailbox; 330 via WordPress Reader; an unknown number via other means through various bookmarking applications. But if…
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Shawangunk
This was amazing! I’d heard about Shawangunk Grasslands NWR for years, but only made it up there for the first time last month. And we were lucky, since word had it that the previous two afternoon/evenings were not very active. Maybe it was the snow the night before we got there? The reserve is maintained…
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Cyanocitta cristata
Or at least one lone feather from a Blue Jay.
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Raptor Wednesday
A crop of Cooper’s! These were all seen on the same day recently in Green-Wood. Four sightings, I think of three individual birds, but possibly four. I inadvertently flushed the first (seen in first two photos). It was hiding in an evergreen thicket; I didn’t see the bird until it flew out and landed nearby.…
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Corvus corax
On New Year’s Day, 2015, I saw a pair of Common Ravens at the eastern terminus of 39th St. in Sunset Park. They were canoodling and grooming each other. A mated pair in Brooklyn? When was the last time that happened? Were they here when Europeans arrived? In more recent decades, ravens stuck to remote…
Backyard and Beyond 