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Some Brooklyn Mammals
Squirrel sunning. Raccoon snoozing. Chipmunk being very still.Woodchuck being elusive. Check out the ground-hogging here on this slope: a duplex! The animal was peeking out of the nearer, top, hole, but vanished into the burrow before I could turn on my cameraSquirrel eating a… wait a minute, that’s a green-dyed Easter egg, more than a…
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Springing
When last we saw some blooming Round-lobed Hepatica, it was the white variety in Brooklyn Bridge Park. Over the weekend, we found a little cluster of the pink variation further north in Black Rock Forest.We initially took this pleated beauty for Skunk Cabbage, but further research by the Horticulturalist tells us this is actually False…
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Earth Day
In reality, of course, everyday is Earth Day.From the Black Rock Forest, here’s an emerging Wild Ginger (Asarum canadense) flower. An Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis).And some Green Frogs (Rana clamitans), before or after amplexus?
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Raptor Wednesday
The triumvirate:Red-tailed Hawk in Green-Wood.Cooper’s at Floyd Bennett Field. American Kestrel atop the Green-Wood gate. That’s a lightning rod next to this lightning bolt of a bird.
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Nature Morte
The French for still life is nature morte. Doesn’t that just light up your brain?These senescent Tulipa held together a good long week.
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Young Snap
Four, count ’em four, Red-eared Sliders (Trachemys scripta) were basking in the tiny, northernmost pond on Pier One at Brooklyn Bridge Park the other day. Fools keep releasing these invasive, potentially disease-carrying pet-trade animals. Some do it for religious (!) reasons! The effects of all this can be seen in the water course in Prospect…
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Tanka
Late afternoon Moon rising over Brooklyn Heights ~ I forget the Sun Homeward-bound at end of day Night will never be that dark. I have been reading Bashō’s travel sketches, culminating in his famous “Narrow Road to the Deep North.” I’m moved by the Japanese tradition of making an event of the contemplation of natural…
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Skunk Cabbage Again
The spathes of Symplocarpus foetidus surround a spadix, which produces first female and then male flowers.I’m afraid a fence keeps me from getting closer, but a portion of a grenade-like spadix can be seen here. It’s this that produces the heat, through rapid respiration (burning carbohydrates via oxidation), that give this plant its early spring,…
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Backyard and Beyond 