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Jamaica Bay and Colombia
One of the male ospreys who breeds in Jamaica Bay was fitted with a GPS tracker this migration season. The bird is now “wintering” in Colombia. I put wintering in quotes because although migratory birds head south to avoid our winter, they go to places in Central and South America where winter is an extremely…
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Red-breasted
I practically walked into this Red-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta canadensis) a week ago on Nantucket. We were eye-to-eye for a moment, until it worked its way further into some kind of tiny-leaved elm. The island was flush with these nuthatches while I was there. I even saw a few White-breasted Nuthatches on the island, which I…
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Trick
Those fake cobwebs some people insist on garbaging their homes with this time of year turn out to be as effective as real cobwebs in trapping dust, bits of leaves, and, as I noticed on Congress St. the other day, a dozen wasps.Vespula maculifrons, the Eastern Yellowjacket. Black antennae, remember, are good for IDing the…
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Early Autumn
Yellow-rumped warblers, catbirds, hermit thrushes, various sparrows, honey bees, bumblebees, large milkweed bugs, and one lone dragonfly, amid the seedheads, drooping stalks, and last hurrah of blooms.
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Peregrine
Storm King Mountain, not quite at peak fall color on Sunday. This picture was from atop Little Stony Point, which is just north of Cold Spring, NY, beneath the better known Bull Mountain (Mt. Taurus). Granite used to be shipped from here to the city to build little things like the Brooklyn Bridge. While facing…
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Four October Butterflies
On Friday at Fort Tilden, the sun was bright when I got there but a cold front moved in from the northwest as I stood atop the hawk watch platform. These were all seen while the sun was still bright.Monarchs (Danaus plexippus) predominated, still, floating along the coast towards the south. A sulphur, probably Clouded…
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Hawk Watch
Looking northwest towards Gotham-Metropolis; the birds come cruising along from the right. It’s no Hawk Mountain or Veracruz, Mexico, where thousands of North America’s Broad-winged hawks squeeze by on their way south, but I’ve never been to those places, and home is where the raptor is. Or at least just passing through, following the coast…
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Beyond the Feathers
I usually only use my own photography here, but this image was too impressive to not share. It’s an X-ray of a young Peregrine falcon male who was caught up in some electrical wires on Nantucket recently and sent to the Humane Society/Fund for Animals’ Cape Wildlife Center (and on Facebook) for rehabilitation. There was…
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Bird Sense
Tim Birkhead’s Bird Sense: What’s It’s Like to Be a Bird details our current knowledge of birds and the history of how we got to this state. Written for the lay reader, a person with an interest in the world; by which I mean it’s hardly necessary that you be a bird watcher to enjoy…
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Explorers
Holly Sears‘s art on this Poetry in Motion poster caught me by surprise the other day. These are elephants, but with the series title “Hudson River Explorers” and the sturgeon, I immediately thought of other giants, the mastodons and the mammoths. Those big creatures used to roam North America; Jefferson even charged Lewis and Clark…
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Backyard and Beyond 