Fieldnotes
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Raptor Wednesday
Old faithful: Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis). You will see these all over the city, as often perched upon a human edifice as in tree. The guard at Woodlawn Cemetery’s Jerome/Bainbridge Avenue gate said there’s frequently a Red-tail atop this chapel’s steeple. Further into the grounds, I heard a Common Raven making that distinctive knocking sound…
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Franklinia BK
I discovered recently that Green-Wood Cemetery has a couple of Franklin Trees (Franklinia alatamaha). One may be the largest specimen in the country. But don’t get too carried away: this is not a giant species. This one might be all of 20 feet tall. It sure does have fine autumnal foliage, though. Windfall fruit and…
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Hickory Yellow
Traditionally, red leaves get most of the glory in the fall*, but don’t forget the yellows of beeches and hickories in the sunshine. A sight on the Jerome Wetlands Trail in Van Cortlandt Park: giant and youngsters of different Carya species. (Reproduced a little too orange above by the phone camera, though.)This image, with a…
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Autumnal Thoughts
Forests are fragmented, wetlands are drained, the great anthropogenic extinction continues. Insect populations are plummeting. Life itself is under assault in the name of capital. Meanwhile, botanical gardens, of all places, are clear-cutting woodlands for parking lots. And of course, gangster oligarchs run riot across the planet, polluting and looting between occasional bouts of pissing…
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Ah, nuts!
“Filbert? Filbert? Where is that boy?”Turkish filbert or hazelnut (Corylus colurna). Shell and two halves of another. The frilly husk, or bristly involucre to the hort pros, of the nut dries out to a gnarly, tentacled beauty. I was late this year and found only two twisted, nut-less examples under this Green-Wood tree, so here’s…
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Detente
Is this an art project on Green-Wood’s Valley Water? * It makes you wonder, doesn’t it? It’s not like ignorance and stupidity are new enemies. They may be the oldest enemies of all. But ignorance (not knowing) and stupidity (not wanting to know) are incredibly empowered now and very readily exploitable by forces directly affecting…
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Flinty
The National Museum of Copenhagen is filled with flint tools from the pre-metal millennia. This stuff makes for very sharp edges. The stone of Europe’s Stone Age, flint stones were also used to start fires and spark guns into the 19th century. The Baltic beaches were littered with nodules of this dark chert. It’s a…
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Raptor Wednesday
A couple of species of raptors have been called Chicken Hawks, so the name isn’t very definitive.I’m using it here for this Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii) because there are actually chickens in a yard next to this building in the Bronx. Roosters, too (technically illegal because of the noise, but law isn’t much enforced in…
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After the Woodcock Storm
On Saturday, I couldn’t help flushing more than two dozen “mud bats,” or American Woodcock (Scolopax minor), in Green-Wood Cemetery during an hour’s walk. On Sunday, although we spent nearly three hours there and covered a much greater extent of the grounds, we only only found three. One of them, though, allowed us to observe…
Backyard and Beyond 