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Persimmon Bandit
Yesterday’s pictured Persimmons (Diospyros virginiana) were not quite ripe. Here’s another: Looks ripe, but it’s still pretty hard. And they really have to be smushy soft to eat. Then they are perfumed and delicious. But bite too soon and you’ll get a mouthful of astringent tannins that you’ll rue all day long. Bleagh! Funny thing,…
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Borough Kestrels
This male Kestrel zoomed up to the top of Green-Wood’s Gothic Revival gate while a Red-tailed Hawk circled overhead. Then it made an unsuccessful dive at a Monk Parakeet, a bird roughly its own size. I’ve noted Kestrels up there before.This one found the lights and goal posts of the football field at Floyd Bennett…
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Mushroom Monday
All found on the same uprooted tree. This is possibly a Sandy fatality, meaning three years later, this supposedly “dead” thing is swarming with life.
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Brooklyn Grasslands
A long-shot of the grasslands at Floyd Bennett Field. The telephoto lens condenses the space, as in a Kurosawa movie, and the grasses and scrubs hide the wide runway between the two separate patches before the woods. These colors were enhanced in their subtleness by the misty day.
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Habit
Tulip Trees (Liriodendron tulipifera) are some of the largest trees here in the East. In the woods, they tend to grow up very straight, as in the NYBG example below, shooting up quickly to get the light and not bothering with broadly branching. There are some wonderful examples in the Midwood in Prospect Park and…
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Buteo
The broad-winged hawks of the genus Buteo are named after the Latin name of the Common Buzzard. If that sentence doesn’t open up a can of Annelida, I don’t know what will. Buteo simply means “hawk.” There is a North American species called the Broad-winged Hawk (Buteo platypterus). Here in the U.S. “buzzard” is another…
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Backyard and Beyond 