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Cottonwood Air
There was so much Eastern Cotton fluff, it was easy to scoop up a handful off the ground. A single mature Populus deltoides can produce an estimated 40 million seeds in a season. The seed is inside the dried fruit or achene attached to cotton-like filaments that help transport it through the air.Here’s my attempt…
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Sheet Music
A bridge and a stream. What more could Organ Pipe Mud-dauber Wasps (Trypoxylon politum) need than shelter from the rain and a source of their building material? Well, spiders, of course. These wasps paralyze spiders to feed their young inside these mud-nests. Here’s an interesting observation: Tufted Titmouse and Downy Woodpeckers breaking into these to…
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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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