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Winter Bright
House Finch, Carpodacus mexicanus, in Prospect Park. This is the colorful male; the female is drably stripy. The species is native to southwestern North America. The birds were sold on the East Coast by the pet trade as “Hollywood Finches” until dealing in wild songbirds was made illegal in 1940. Pet store owners, an appalling…
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Borough of Trees? Since When?
The Greek Revival wooden colonnade connecting these four townhouses on Willow Place in Brooklyn Heights is a wonderful window into the au courant style of the 1840s. But this isn’t an architecture blog. What I want to share with you is the trees. When Berenice Abbott took a picture of this row on May 14,…
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Brooklyn’s Grasslands
You can’t see them in this picture, but there are thirty-five or so Horned Lark on the ground here at the northwestern corner of Floyd Bennett Field. One of the few open ground bird species on the East Coast, Eremophilia alpestris breeds at the tundra top of North America. The Lower 48 are their wintering…
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Faire du lèche-vitrine
The French phrase for window shopping literally means to lick the window. I found this stuffed peacock in a window on the corner of Henry and Atlantic.
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Two Habitats
1.) A Rufus Hummingbird has been hanging out by the entrance to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. This species, Selasphorus rufus, is more generally found in the Northwest and West, so its continued presence in Manhattan since December has been cause for comment. The bird is…
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Thank you very mulch
Ah, the brief, brutal life of a Xmas tree! Raised and decapitated on forced labor farms, sold on the street like runaways, weighed down with gaudy baubles, choked with tinsel, worshipped by young savages in their onesies clamoring for boodle… and then cruelly abandoned to the sidewalks like so much garbage. The least you could…
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Complexity
Back from the winter festive season visiting family, and brushes with differing mindsets. One bemoans environmentalism and its -ists, so I ask if he likes to breath. “When we tug on a single thing in nature we find it attached to everything else,” said John Muir. The fact that we, too, are connected, is unfortunately…
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Mortal Foe
Well, it seems it’s finally winter, at least for a day or two. That means cold, just like when I was a boy. Over the weekend we saw a turtle head peeking out of the Lake in Prospect Park. That’s no sign of winter! Two weeks ago, I was battling mosquitos in the tropics of…
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Backyard and Beyond 