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Raptor Wednesday: Earth Day Edition
In April 1970, at the time of the first Earth Day, there weren’t many Bald Eagles to be found in the Lower 48. Your chance of seeing one over Brooklyn, of all places, was extremely unlikely. Practically fabulous. That they might breed within the city’s limits was an equally outlandish notion. Even before DDT brought…
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Pandemic Notes II
This April has been cooler than March. More rain, too. Or so it seems. The cruelest month? “Breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land” wrote Eliot, ladling out more metaphor than botany from his chilly Modernist citadel. The NYC death toll is now over 13,000. I can’t keep up with the tally. In addition to the…
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Orange Pollen
Little flower, big bee. Long tongue into the nectar, anther against the forehead. This Lamium isn’t letting the bee leave town without some pollen. But wait just a minute. This bee has a white face. The only white-faced bee I know is the male Eastern Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa virginica), but this one was rather too…
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Small Birds
Palm Warbler. Golden-crowned Kinglet. Yellow-rumped Warbler variations. Pine Warbler. Blue-gray Gnatcatcher. Here’s a special one. Yellow-throated Warblers breed to the south of us. So they’re rarer up here, having overshot their migration. Note the lores here. The spaces between the eyes and the bill. That line is white in this case. This makes this one…
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Toxicodendron radicans
There are few finer things in this universe, at least the very small but opulent patch of it that I know, than the gloss of new poison ivy leaves.
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Beech Sproutling
This curious thing is what you get when a beechnut sprouts. Considering the number of beechnuts dropped by a mature tree, these aren’t commonly seen. Does the parent tree’s shade and/or chemistry suppresses upstarts?
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Daily Raptor
The male was eating. He holds the gobbet of meat. Probably bird, although last week I saw he was munching on a small mammal, a baby rat or a mouse. (Photo through screen window.) And then, on Monday evening, the female was eating a lizard! I first became aware of Italian Wall Lizards because of…
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Some Flower Flies
Margined Calligrapher (Toxomerus marginatus) Mating Eastern Calligraphers (Toxomerus geminatus) Variable Duskyface (Melanostoma mellinum), male I think. Variable Duskyface female. Pollen-dusted Black-shouldered Drone Fly (Eristalis dimidiata) Dandilions and henbit deadnettle the flowers here. Plus, as an extra bonus you also get this recent march fly observation: Bibio genus something. Check out that beetle-like head.
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Pandemic Notes
We live on 6th Avenue in Brooklyn, at the top of the Harbor Hill moraine, and look down towards Upper New York Bay. The water begins a block from 1st Avenue. That’s where you’ll find the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal facility stretching north from 39th St. In the last couple of days, some three dozen…
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