birding
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Woodcock Moon
According to a tweet from a British wildlife trust, November’s first full moon is known as a Woodcock Moon because it “coincides with an influx of these nocturnal woodlanders.” Well, yesterday, on this side of the Atlantic, following Friday night’s full moon, Green-Wood Cemetery was positively timberdoodle-riffic. I counted, conservatively, twenty-eight of the buffy orange-bellied…
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Et in Arcadia Ego
Still sparrow, moving fly.A White-throated Sparrow, no doubt recently arrived from the north. In NYC, dead birds can be reported to NYC Audubon. This database is intended to track window- and building-strikes. This bird was found in the middle of McGolrick Park, but I noted it anyway. It’s All Hallows, the Day of the Dead,…
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The Blackbird of Song and Legend
The Common or Eurasian Blackbird, Turdus merula. Unlike our New world blackbirds, this is a thrush, and rather similar to the American Robin (Turdus migratorius) in habit. Our blackbirds are Icteridae; the thrushes are Turdidae. Our Robin, meanwhile, isn’t related to their Robin (Erithacus rubecula).This is the bird that bursts out of the pie, alive…
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Raptor Wednesday
We were eating dinner in Park Slope, near a known hole-in-the-cornice Kestrel nest site. After dinner, we noticed a Kestrel making sorties for bugs up a side street. The bird returned to this perch twice and was still there as we left the scene.
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Fall-ish
Yesterday was the first day it felt like fall, more than three weeks past the equinox. And then it dropped to 41 overnight. This morning the radiators were gurgling. Locally, not many leaves have turned yet, but these, fallen from a Nyssa sylvatica (Black Gum, Black Tupelo), are in the mood.This Eastern Phoebe was a…
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Some Birds
The Swedish trip recedes swiftly into the past, but digital memory lives on! Here are a few of the birds I managed to get photos of:Great Tit (Parus major) at a Swedish-made bird feeder in the Botanical Garden in Copenhagen. This angle does not show the black streak running down the GT’s breast, so here’s…
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Raptor Wednesday at the Movies
The first sight of a church yard in Copenhagen triggered a memory that bloomed in Sweden. I’d seen such graveyards before: the gravel plots fenced in by foot-high hedges rigorously trimmed, the raked patterns in the somber gray sand. Very orderly, compact, clean. It was all in the 1999 Swedish film Falkens öga/Kestrel’s Eye, about…
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Muddy Duck
Ah, the White-breasted… wait a minute?Who the devil is this? These large, distinctive ducks were spotted all over Copenhagen.Took me a minute to figure out what I was looking at, later confirmed by our bird guide in Sweden. What do you think?
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Birds in Hand IV
A juvenile male Bearded Reedling (Panurus biarmicus), known as skäggmes to the locals, at the Flommen banding station.The adult males have black markings down the sides of their face, the “beard,” rather more like a full mustache. This species has also been called Bearded Parrotbill and Bearded Tit. It seems to be in its own…
Backyard and Beyond 