Fieldnotes
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Mimus polyglottos
And who hasn’t felt the side-eye of a Northern Mockingbird greedily claiming all the little pears of winter? Different day, same patch. A different tree this time: those red linden branchlets! Same bird? In this case, it was much colder so there some puffed-up feather action here. Great insulation, feathers. I wore down myself yesterday.
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Pulp Nonfiction
All right, then, I will admit an obsession with these Bald-faced Hornet nests. The scraps of paper blown down from one that I bought home recently revealed at least two tiny invertebrate species making their home there after the wasps were undone by the year. At 10x magnification, you really begin to see the tiny…
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Bark
Street signs. Wrought iron. Chain link. The trees don’t care. They will absorb the things in their way. Here’s a local Empress Tree (Paulownia tomentosa ), pressing through some fencing as the bark alligators in remembrance.
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The Year in Raptors
Suddenly, every local Rock Dove and Starling is in the air. They swirl this way and that, creating visual confusion: which way do your eyes go? Then just as suddenly, the long tail of a Cooper’s Hawk concentrates the eye in the airborne melee. The Accipiter is hunting, surfing over the tops of buildings, jetting…
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Drake Gadwall
Winter means ducks and their allies bobbing and diving offshore. The little blubber-bombs shrug off the cold, cold water. A recent trip to wind-ripped Bush Terminal Park revealed Brant, Mallard, American Black Duck, American Wigeon, Red-breasted Merganser, Bufflehead, Red-throated Loon, and Gadwall in the bays. You need to get a close view of the latter,…
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Snow Hat
Within a short distance of the 25th St. entrance to Green-Wood, there are five of these big Bald-faced Hornet nests.A pair in neighboring trees. And yesterday, I found some of the paper of one of them strewn about. Now that’s what I call wrapping paper!
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All Melted Since
Big Carbon knew they were causing global warming in the 1970s. But they, and their sociopath plutocratic allies, started funding PR campaigns to attack science and scientists who said so. The denialists were born, and they successfully took over the reactionary Republicans with their base in angry ignorance. Now these extremists have grown into a…
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Whose Woods These Are
I think I know.The winter woodpeckers are out there. Red-bellied Woodpeckers, as above, and Downy Woodpeckers are our regulars. A few Hairy Woodpeckers and Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers keep us honest. And yet… The indispensable Monbiot on not knowing what we’re losing. A must read. Here, if you really want to wallow, are some things I’ve written…
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Hickory
“Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been, I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.” ~ Henry David Thoreau Even as we discover invertebrates almost daily, we’re losing them. A lament. There…
Backyard and Beyond 