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A Parliament of Owls
York Street mural by Craig Anthony Miller (“CAM”), who wisely uses a gas mask when working with his medium.
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Hawking Around
Just before the storm, a friend who lives in Manhattan’s Chinatown sent me this phone picture of a raptor she saw on a playground on the edge of the Al Smith Houses. She wanted to know what it was. When I first started to bird-watch, I found the raptors a challenge. Still do. Some are…
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Kestrel
American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) doing its hovering-hunting over grasslands. They face the wind, flare their tails, and stiffly beat their wings to hang still as they scan the ground below for movement or signs of prey. Remarkable to see. Especially when a NYPD helicopter is doing something similar nearby. Long-shot… like this raptor’s every drop…
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Special Mega Non-Storm Edition
The capital of media bullshit makes it through another insignificant winter storm. I send my best wishes to people in the Midwest and New England who actually had some serious weather; pay no mind our hysteria and ratings/click-whoring news-tainment companies, who must feed on your eyes like a parasite to survive. Rather more impressive was…
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King Eider
Snowy Owls aren’t our only Arctic visitors. This is a male, or drake, King Eider (Somateria spectabilis). I saw my first ever earlier this month, when, after the Brooklyn CBC, we all hurried over to Beach 59th St. on the Rockaways. The other day another was spotted off Fort Tilden. This time I had my…
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The Earth Abides
At the end of Emile Zola’s 1890 novel, La Bête Humaine, a train full of soldiers hurls along the rails into Paris. There’s no one is control of the thing, for, after much madness and jealousy, the engineer and the fireman have killed each other. The doomed train is Zola’s vision of technology going berserk.…
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Cooper’s
Cooper’s Hawk (Accipiter cooperii) in Prospect. The red-orange eyes are a mark of a mature bird; juvenile birds have yellowish eyes. This accipiter, or forest hawk, is named after William Cooper, one of the founders of the New York Academy of Sciences; the species was named and first described by the naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte…
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Silhouette Bird
A silhouette on a hazy day… a bird on the head of all-seeing Justice atop Brooklyn Borough Hall. My first thought: probably a pigeon, yet this looked too upright for that. My view from below on the street could account for that angle, of course, but there were, notably, no other pigeons in evidence. Ah-ha,…
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Xmas with the Owls
Some more pics, from the Snowy Owl Irruption of 2013-14. We may never see this many Snowy Owls again in Brooklyn (and throughout the NE and into the Great Lakes Midwest). While a bonanza for us, this massive irruption isn’t necessarily good for the birds. These are mostly juvenile birds, and juveniles of any species…
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Backyard and Beyond 