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Start Your Week Right
An Eastern Kingbird perching near invasive honey bee hives.But not hunting.Doing… some calisthenics?Whoa… Forcing up a pellet…With that done, the bird returned to zooming amongst the bees.This is a wad of exoskeleton bits. (Much like good french fries, insects are crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside, but instead of a surface layer…
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Topography
“Brooklyn with its hills.” “The ample hills of Brooklyn.” The view from the morainal hill. Here’s Whitman again, talking of the borough I’ve lived in for a quarter century. Hills? You ask quizzically if you’ve never walked up Union Street from Carroll Gardens across the Gowanus Canal up to Grand Army Plaza. Whitman was a…
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Odes
Spot-winged Glider, in a rare perch. They can spend hours in the air.Blue Dasher male, quite common and frequently perched.Eastern Pondhawk male.Male Painted SkimmerThis damselfly is peculiar. I can find no matching ID for it, and both iNaturalist and bugguide.net remain silent to my queries. I think it may be a maturing andromorph (that is,…
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A Specimen Day
The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab and my loitering. I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world. Walt Whitman was born this day 200 years ago, “starting from fish-shape Paumanok” or Long Island as…
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Part of Life, Too
Not an uncommon sight these days: a nestling fallen from the nest. (There were no trees above this spot.) You’ll notice small golden ants on the corpse. They’re moving on from here…And on a forest path… *** So, maybe bee hotels aren’t such a great thing after all. This study found they benefited introduced species…
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Recent Birds
Eastern Willet.Red-winged Blackbird female.Tree Swallow male.The male was perched above this nest box with a female boldly covering the entrance.Red-breasted Mergansers.Yellow-crowned Night-heron. House Wren.
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American Robin
May 8th. May 9th. May 15th. There’s a fourth in the back right. On May 16, the nest was empty. Young American Robins leave the nest before they can fly. People sometimes find them and think they’ve fallen out and need help. But they are fine. Unless the cat is out, in which case put…
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Buds
Liriodendron tulipifera. And something in the Theaceae family… *** As you know, the well of the federal judiciary is being poisoned by reactionary ideologues, shoveled in by Mitch McConnell’s corrupt control of the Senate as part of the culmination of the Federalist Society’s long effort to return control of the law to the corporations and…
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Recent Books
Lewis Dartnell’s Origins: How Earth’s History Shaped Human History is hard to put down. He’s a determinist, arguing that our species have been ruled by Milankovitch cycles; climate change; plate tectonics; and geology, among other physical factors. Some of this is probably too superficial and glib, but it sure makes for fascinating reading. By the…
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Outtakes
A really good photograph of a bird is somewhat deceiving. The human eye rarely has it so good. And this time of year, with migrating songbirds acrobatically flitting about in thickly leafed-out trees, spotting and tracking a bird is quite a challenge. Ditto the photographing. The long lenses and flashes necessary for money shots, if…
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Backyard and Beyond 