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Mimus polyglottos
And who hasn’t felt the side-eye of a Northern Mockingbird greedily claiming all the little pears of winter? Different day, same patch. A different tree this time: those red linden branchlets! Same bird? In this case, it was much colder so there some puffed-up feather action here. Great insulation, feathers. I wore down myself yesterday.
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Tree Omnibus
The trees are singing. If only we would listen. Tolkien suggested it might be quite hard to hear them, since they sing on a whole different time scale. David George Haskell is listening with microphones and an acute biologist’s senses. The Songs of Trees was one of last year’s best naturalist books, beautifully written and…
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Pulp Nonfiction
All right, then, I will admit an obsession with these Bald-faced Hornet nests. The scraps of paper blown down from one that I bought home recently revealed at least two tiny invertebrate species making their home there after the wasps were undone by the year. At 10x magnification, you really begin to see the tiny…
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Bark
Street signs. Wrought iron. Chain link. The trees don’t care. They will absorb the things in their way. Here’s a local Empress Tree (Paulownia tomentosa ), pressing through some fencing as the bark alligators in remembrance.
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The Year in Raptors
Suddenly, every local Rock Dove and Starling is in the air. They swirl this way and that, creating visual confusion: which way do your eyes go? Then just as suddenly, the long tail of a Cooper’s Hawk concentrates the eye in the airborne melee. The Accipiter is hunting, surfing over the tops of buildings, jetting…
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Drake Gadwall
Winter means ducks and their allies bobbing and diving offshore. The little blubber-bombs shrug off the cold, cold water. A recent trip to wind-ripped Bush Terminal Park revealed Brant, Mallard, American Black Duck, American Wigeon, Red-breasted Merganser, Bufflehead, Red-throated Loon, and Gadwall in the bays. You need to get a close view of the latter,…
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Raptor Wednesday
Originally posted on Backyard and Beyond: Ran into a family of four Bald Eagles at Mt. Loretto on Staten Island. Haliaeetus leucocephalus: this is one of this year’s youngsters. The white head and tail feathers come in fully by age 4 or so. The bird was making a racket, calling its parents for food. Big,…
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Spreadwings
Originally posted on Backyard and Beyond: I have not come across any of the spreadwing damselflies in Brooklyn. These Lestidae family insects are the exception to the rule that damselflies rest with their wings folded back above their abdomen, in contrast to the dragonflies who don’t fold their wings at all. This year I caught…
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Turtles Galore
Originally posted on Backyard and Beyond: A foot bridge connects the mainland of Jamestown Island with the original settlement of Jamestowne, the first permanent English colony in North America. On a recent visit we barely made it across the old tar and pitch swamp. Because down below in the muck were four species of turtles:…
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