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A Very Warbler Thanksgiving
Debonair male Black-throated Blue, Setophaga caerulescens. They winter mainly in the Caribbean, with some going to the Bahamas and some to the eastern side of the Yucatan. Seen here October 19.While the male BTB sports the same general plumage in the off-breeding as in the breeding season, Palm Warblers (Setophaga palmarum) are much more subdued…
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Raptor Wednesday
It seems like there are American Kestrels everywhere. But how many? Without banding or electronic tracking, I can’t say for sure. But: There were three individual males, a new record, seen together from the windows here recently. There was much tail-pumping amongst the trio as they perched near each other on building and tree. The…
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Limbs Ahoy!
There’s a lot of pre-Thanksgiving activity going on around here. Meanwhile, here is the view from inside a weeping beech.
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American Kestrel News
On Thursday, the first snowfall of the winter caught the city off-guard. Unprotected by congestion pricing, Manhattan, flooded with prowling car service vehicles, came to a traffic standstill. In the boroughs, lots of limbs were sheared off trees from the wet heavy snow and wind. The pictures above are from Wednesday. The male American Kestrel…
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Leviathan?
“What is to be done?” asked Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky in the title of his 1863 novel about the situation of Russian. Chernyshevsky wrote, from prison, something of a “handbook of radicalism,” postulating a sort of utopian peasant/commune/industrial socialism. Perhaps, though, the most important thing about the book was the burning titular question, which fired debate…
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The Tigers of Wrath?
True, they look more like lionesses. I stumbled on this in Green-Wood recently. It’s on the backside of the tombstone for Leon Golub and Nancy Spero, twentieth century artists. I just happened to be passing. Green-Wood has more real animals than artistic representations of them. This is one of the most notable:This bear marks the…
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Ravens & Red-Tails
Three times in the last month I’ve seen Common Ravens and Red-tailed Hawks chasing each other over Green-Wood. From an excellent source, I heard of another aerial ruckus visible overhead while I was elsewhere. The last time was last Sunday. We saw a pair of ravens this time. Then a few minutes later in the…
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Portrait of A White-throated Sparrow
Zonotrichia albicollis.With some seeds still a-bill. These leaf-kicking sparrows should be around all winter, their “oh-sweet-canada” or, for patriots, “oh-sam-peabody” call echoing through the bare woods. This is one of the tan-striped forms. The white-striped forms have a bold white supercillium (eyebrow).(If you strictly translated this bird’s binomial, you’d get “white-banded thrush,” but whatever.)
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Raptor Wednesday
This Red-tailed Hawk in Green-Wood picked up a songbird and took into a pine to pluck. The prey was tiny, possibly a kinglet, hardly seemed worth the effort, and yet…In the top picture, you can see some feathers blowing off to the right. A clump came down to me.Same area, earlier. There were two, sometimes…
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Winter Wrens
When last we saw a Winter Wren in these pages, it was dead and being devoured by a Tufted Titmouse. But I’m sure you didn’t think I’d leave it at that. Here are two Troglodytes hiemalis foraging in proximity. These things are tiny: 0.3 – 0.4 oz (8-12 grams).Insect-eaters, mostly, but they’ll also scarf up…
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Backyard and Beyond 