birding
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Doublewhammy
This Common Grackle with both a broken lower bill and a piece of string stuck onto its foot. *** By The People a new impeachment campaign. Because we can’t depend on politicians.
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Latte Ducks
These two ducklings, still with stubbs of wings, swam against the flow of tumbling Fall Creek to team up with their mother on another rock.This foam looks a little like the froth atop latte or one of those other coffee products. Good segue to this, then? Caffeine, like other drugs we take, passes through us…
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Birds in the Rain
Yes, the bird has caught a little fish here, one of several seen captured and swallowed with dispatch.This Great Blue Heron flew some thousand feet across Beebe Lake in Ithaca to chase away another Great Blue that had just flown in. I would have thought there was room enough for two.Baby flycatchers?!This Cedar Waxwing posing…
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Least Bittern III
The first time I saw a Least Bittern was on Padre Island, Texas. It was a brief glimpse, the bird jumping from one clump of reeds to another. The second time was strange: the bird was high up in a tree in Prospect Park.Third time is a charm of a cliche, but what a sighting!…
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YCNH
This Yellow-crowned Night Heron was belying its name and hunting during the day. Fiddler crabs were the bird’s target. Stalking oh-so-slowly until the final jab with this heavy bill. The crabs were swallowed whole. Watched half a dozen meet this fate over ten minutes. These herons nest here in the city, usually at its edges.…
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Raptor Wednesday
Anticlimactic: that’s what the post-fledgling scene was for the #BrooklynKestrels. Two months of cornice work, followed by two weeks of sightings of a trio of fledglings. Then nada. Well, not quite true. The male parent has been spotted sporadically on the large car service antenna one long avenue block from the nest site. This is…
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Mockingbird Tales
Over the course of a couple of hours at a single vantage point, amidst many other sights and sounds, we watched Mockingbirds do their thing. Which is noisy territorial policing. In the distance, a Mockingbird chased a female Kestrel. (This also happened quite a bit with the local #BrooklynKestrels after fledging; a Mocker seemed to…
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Park-ing
Did you know the verb parking originally meant setting up strips of park, often with trees, in the center or the edges of roads? Then those trees along the road were roped into being used to tie up horses. The meaning of parking thus changed: it became what you did to your horse. From there…
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A Study in Sterna
*** “If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth.” — Vaclav Havel
Backyard and Beyond 