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City Lores
I saw my first egrets of the year Saturday, with three Great Egrets and four Black-crowned Night-herons at Floyd Bennett Field’s little freshwater pond, amidst a thunderous chorus of spring peepers. On Sunday, I saw another Great Egret in Inwood, looking here towards the Bronx, with perhaps a bit of Marble Hill in there as…
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Mourning Cloak
Originally posted on Backyard and Beyond: One of the earliest butterflies of spring, the mourning cloak, Nymphalis antiopa. Appropriately enough for its mournful name, this one was photographed today in Green-Wood Cemetery.
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Ruins
In the Henry Street Basin next to the old Port of New York Authority Grain Terminal* colossus, there were a pair or Mallards, a Gadwall, and a pair of Red-breasted Mergansers. And then there was this: Some kind of carp. Usually, the members of the Cyprinidae are freshwater fish. Here, next to the Gowanus Bay…
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Ouroboros
Originally posted on Backyard and Beyond: Every twenty years or so, my dander gets up and I write a letter to the New York Times. In the mid-1980s, I did it to spank Edward Teller, who poo-pooed the concept of nuclear winter in an Op-Ed, with a reminder of the global climate effects of “Eighteen…
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Skunk Heaven
Hear ye, hear ye! The Skunk Cabbage is up at the Native Flora Garden at Ye Brooklyn Wedding Venue! Symplocarpus foetidus favors wetlands, as this plant demonstrates from mid-gurgle of the stream.Of course, this earliest of spring plants was up already down south weeks ago, but Brooklyn is where I am, so I celebrate it’s…
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Turtle Underground
The great turtle or tortoise holding up the world is an ancient story from China and India — and the New World, whose original inhabitants came from Asia. Less well known is the race of giant tortoises who hold up New York City. Your engineer, the very definition of quotidian, will insist on schist —…
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Scaup
The great rafts of scaup that gather in Dead Horse and Gravesend Bays during the winter will soon be heading to breeding areas in the north. The males are three-toned. The females are brownish with a touch of white on the cheek. I find separating the Greater (Aythya marilla) and Lesser (Aythya affinis) difficult.
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Timberdoodles!
This is American Woodcock (Scolopax minor) country. Actually, this time of year, practically anywhere is American Woodcock country: backyards, bars, porches, Park Avenue medians, DUMBO parking garages. Yes, I’ve heard cases of them appearing in all these places. I’ve written a poem in which I refer to them bombarding us during the migration seasons; I’d link to…
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And by the way…
It’s spring! A Pine Warbler (Setophaga pinus) and Eastern Phoebe (Sayornis phoebe) herald the season in Central Park today.
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