This Eastern Phoebe had just eaten a cellophane bee. This male Red-bellied Woodpecker would not stop chortling about the nesting hole he’d made. Ah, well, when you’re a Carolina Wren, you just chortle, don’t you? A trio of Tree Swallows and a Barn Swallow. Temperatures were below freezing yesterday. And the swallows seemed very chill.

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Grey Squirrel gnawing on a bone. You know, one of those bones you find downslope from the road where the garbage piles up…. I suspect this is like the recycling of deer antlers by mice and other mammals in the forest. Going for the calcium? This may well be the nesting female seen earlier this…

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There’s a light blue band on this Red-tailed Hawk, in addition to the regular silver band on the other foot. Don’t see many banded hawks around here. The bird was one of three seen at the same time. Blue-banded, upper left, is one of the birds building a nest. The immature bird on lower right…

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Last Friday it was in the mid 70s, the warmest day so far. The sun was out, and so were clouds of what turned out to be small male ants. There were much larger orange somethings in the air as well. Females, as it turned out. I was despairing of photographing any of them when…

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Question Mark. Black-shouldered Drone Fly. Unequal Cellophane Bee. Eastern Carpenter Bee. Andrena genus bee. (There are some 450 species in this genus in North America.) You’ll notice all of the above pictures show the same flowers. Pieris japonica, one of the few things fully blooming currently. Winged male Small Honey Ant. Which is a segue…

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A pair of Mallards were fishing! Paddling up to the goldfish and then lunging at them. Didn’t see any catches… There were an awful lot of goldfish in the Dell Water. Here’s the thing: for most of last year, the Dell was practically just a puddle, half of it dry and overgrown with various plants.…

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Apologies: I never finished yesterday’s post. Thursday’s first round of vaccine shots occupied much of my day and I forgot I’d drafted a rant for Friday morning. Both us got the Pfizer as over 50 year olds. There was some soreness in our arms and a craving for margaritas afterwards. We return in three weeks…

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I haven’t been in Prospect Park in a year. Before that, for about half a dozen years, I only visited a few times a year. What a change this has been in my life! This blog’s “beyond” was Prospect when I first started. I live a little further away now, but the real reason is…

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Glimpses of the comblike projections (lamellae) along the edge of this male Northern Shoveler’s bill. They use these to filter their food from the water. Food includes tiny crustaceans, other aquatic invertebrates, and seeds.

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