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Blue Birds
Unexpected. Always welcome, thrillingly so. But not, perhaps, by perennially territorial Mockingbirds. I’ll be leading a Brooklyn Bird Club walk on Saturday, 11/23, starting at 8 a.m. in Green-Wood Cemetery.
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Ocean Double Feature
This is a great book combo: Helen Czerski’s The Blue Machine explains why planet Earth should really be called planet Ocean. Susan Casey’s The Underworld takes us on journeys to the deepest parts of this Ocean world, the places until very recently we knew almost nothing about. A physicist and oceanographer, Czerski explains how the ocean works and how…
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Raptor Wednesday Supplemental
Recently, I’ve seen this male American Kestrel with songbird, dragonfly, and mantis prey. Here he has a lizard, picked off the ground along with some grasses. These introduced lizards have become a major source of food for our local Kestrels. *** Tuesday’s disaster will be a disaster for the environment and biodiversity like it will…
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Raptor Wednesday
There has been a big shake-up in raptor taxonomy. American Goshawk (Astur atricapillus) and Coopers Hawk (Astur cooperii) have been removed from genus Accipiter. These two are closely-related; there has even been evidence that they can hybridize. They are not, however, closely related to the Sharp-shinned Hawk (Accipter striatus), which remains an Accipiter. Convergent evolution…
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Backyard and Beyond 