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Red Star
Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) amid oaks and others. * Hannah Arendt, who died on November 4th, 1975 wrote this: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.” (Alabama Republicans the latest marks of…
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Revealed
Paper can be strong stuff, but it’s all relative. The exterior coating of wood-pulp paper made by Dolichovespula maculata hornets, who scrape dead trees (or fence posts!) with their mighty jaws, has been stripped off by the weather. Horizontal layers of comb are revealed within. And still-capped larvae probably all killed by the freeze. The…
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Belted
The female Belted Kingfisher (Megaceryle alcyon) was tick-purring at Valley Water again recently. This time I got some better photos and got to listen to her for some minutes. (Long-time readers may recognize the hedgehog galls glimpsed on the leaves of this oak, and also that the tree has gotten a bit taller in four…
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Ecrasez l’infame!
We interrupt our usual programing to bring you this breaking news: the plutocrats are winning the class war. Last night’s 2 a.m. passage of a unread bill stuffed with handwritten-by-lobbyists giveaways to the ultra rich is a brazenly kleptocratic transfer of wealth towards the 1% (and their children, an aristocracy in the making) with radical…
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Spider Update
On Wednesday, Araneus diadematus ate brunch. Judging from the size and shape of the mummified-in-silk prey, I’d say it was a fly. The temperature was already near 50 that morning and would rise up to 60 in the afternoon. Diptera weather! There were also two gnats stuck to the web, but these were so small…
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November Slider
Recently on Valley Water… a lone Red-eared slider was enjoying the freakish day. * I no more enjoy writing about the human excrement that is Donald Trump than you do reading about it. When he tweeted the disgusting Britain First tweets yesterday, giving aid and comfort to yet more fascists — the murderer of MP…
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Raptor Wednesday
Well, hello there! My first sight of this male American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) was a dark shape in a tree. The winter sun is getting so low on the horizon that even at 1:30 in the afternoon every bird with the sun behind it looks like a Starling.Him falcon was mighty obliging, though, allowing me…
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Oak Wilt, Damn It
Word around the corner on the avenue, although of course it should also be in Spanish (as here) and Cantonese. Greenwood Heights is located some twenty blocks away, tucked around Green-Wood Cemetery. There are plenty of oaks in Green-Wood, where the disease may have first been noted, as well as on the street. Here’s a…
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For the Pollinators
I recently attended a pollinator working group meeting here in Brooklyn sponsored by the City Parks Foundation and the National Wildlife Federation.* I’d like to share some of the things I came away with. Honeybees are ever in the news, but there are over two hundred other species of bees found in New York City.…
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The Spider Who Stayed Out in the Cold
This large Araneus diadematus orb-weaver has been living outside a Bronx living room window for nearly three months now. That included the last of summer, when a large window fan blew out towards her, making the web bounce like a trampoline. The web spans the breadth of the window. When she isn’t in its center,…
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