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Brilliant Disguise
This hairy, burly flier certainly suggests a bumble bee head-butting her way into the nectar and pollen.But, taking it from the top, the characteristic eyes of a fly let us know that this is a bee-mimicking fly. In addition, the two wings literally point to Diptera, the order of flies, named after their two wings.…
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BCNH
Black-crowned Night-heron stalking the shallows at low tide.A slow, patient hunter, but given to snapping the neck rather suddenly, making that breeding plume corkscrew. Is this to throw water droplets off the bill?What’s for lunch? This bird is another all-purpose devourer. In this case — three separate cases while I watched — it was worms…
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YCNH
Yellow-crowned Night-herons, Nyctanassa violacea, at the Salt Marsh Nature Center.“Where the yellow-crown’d heron comes to the edge of the marsh at night and feeds upon small crabs” wrote Whitman in Song of Myself. The low tide here reveals fiddler crabs amongst the marsh grasses. This one grabbed a crab with some nearby seaweed, took the…
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Raptor Wednesday
What a racket! Twice recently I’ve come across a storm of American Robins sounding their strident chip alarms. A perching Red-tailed Hawk was the source of the commotion both times. In this second case, a buzzing Northern Mockingbird was in on it, too, repeatedly razzing, sometimes even clipping, the big raptor. When the hawk flew…
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Lichen
Lichens, like other lifeforms, are sensitive to air pollution. So the relative scrubbing of the air in the last few generations — before the Republican counter-revolution — has brought back lichen communities to NYC. Cemeteries are the one of best places to see lichens because they don’t have the road traffic of the streets and…
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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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Backyard and Beyond 