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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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Darning (?)
Common Green Darner dragonflies (Anax junius). This is a migratory species, one of the first seen in the spring and one of the last seen in the fall as they move up and down North America. Male is grasping the female as she oviposits, laying her eggs in the lake in Woodlawn Cemetery. Not all…
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Butterflies
At Berkeley, the Harrison’s plantation on the James River, we thought we had an Monarch among the ghosts of Declaration of Independence signers and presidents.But looking closer, we discovered the famous Monarch mimic, the Viceroy (Limenitis archippus). The black band across the hindwings is the tell. And the diminutive size compared to the big orange…
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Biodiversity Day
Well, the picture of the aphid on the street oak tree leaf that feeds the ladybug was too blurry to use, but you get my drift… . We certainly merit an extra post today for biodiversity. This is the husk of the larval stage of the Winter Firefly (Pyractomena borealis). As firefly maven Sara Lewis…
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Raptor Wednesday
Brooklyn’s airspace can be crowded. On Raven Day, the subject of my last two posts, I watched a Red-tail Hawk and Common Raven chase each other. Another Red-tail joined the fray, but didn’t stay long. Sometimes the R chased the RT, sometimes the RT chased the R.Both birds were quite vocal: hoarse guttural calls from…
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More Ravens!
Books have been written by the intelligence and culture of ravens. It’s extraordinary to be near these largest of the songbirds, listening to their hoarse chatter. They’ve certainly figured out how to live in urban areas. There’s both the wild, in this case duck eggs, and the domestic, in this case chicken eggs from Costco.…
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Backyard and Beyond 