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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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Ravens!
Four Common Grackles chase a Common Raven near Green-Wood Cemetery’s neo-gothic entrance. The Grackles nest in pines in this area. As soon as this Raven was escorted off-site, I turned around to see another of the huge corvids further in the cemetery. Then, I heard them. The Class of 2019 has six members! More pictures…
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A.C. Bent & Co. on Raptors
Arthur Cleveland Bent published twenty-one volumes in his Life Histories of North American Birds between 1919 and 1968. The last two volumes were posthumous. They originally came out in the U.S. National Museum Bulletin. Later they were republished by Dover. There’s an internet edition now. The Dover paperbacks are a standard sight in used book store natural…
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Recent Birds
Spotted Sandpiper. A few have been working their way around the edges of the ponds in Green-Wood.Black-throated Blue Warbler.Eastern Kingbird.Hooded Warbler female.Rose-breasted Grosbeak. Female, much plainer than the showy male.Most of our migrants are insectivores, but these big-beaks are seed-crushers. *** George Boorujy’s Gang of Warblers is now available as a print. Very reasonably priced,…
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Red-headed Excavations
This Red-headed Woodpecker kept going in head-first and emerging tail-first to toss wood scraps away. This was in Virginia. It’s unusual to see one of these in NYC, although sometimes juveniles will show up — they don’t have the flag-like color blocking. During the winter of ’13-’14, a juvenile spent the winter in Green-Wood and…
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Backyard and Beyond 