birding
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Raptor Week II
Red-tailed Hawk. Buteo jamaicensis: “of Jamaica,” where the original specimen was taken. The most common road-side and soaring hawk of North America. To recap, the common name is particularly unhelpful when you get a yearling like this one. The brick-red tail feathers don’t appear until after the first year of life, if they’re the one out of…
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Raptor Week I
Cooper’s Hawk. Accipiter cooperii. William C. Cooper’s hawk. The species was named in his honor by Charles Lucien Bonaparte. Cooper was a conchologist and founder of what became the New York Academy of Sciences. Bonaparte was a Bonaparte, a nephew of the Emperor, and an ornithologist who explored the U.S. in the 1820s. You can’t…
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Wigeon And All
An American Wigeon (Anas americana) and American Black Duck (Anas rubripes). The other day a commentor here bemoaned the intrusion of ideas into his refined quest for pictures of nature. Those who refuse to make the connection between politics and the natural world, or what there is of it, are a monstrous problem. From the beginning…
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Raptor Wednesday
A Cooper’s Hawk on a winter’s day. Here’s Audubon’s rendition. Normally, I find JJ’s birds on the strangely attenuated side, longer and skinnier than they are, probably a result in his pinning up their dead bodies to illustrate them. But I like his capturing of the patterning on the back here very much. Another thing…
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Fevers
A couple of the eight Fox Sparrows (Passerella iliaca) I ran into recently. That’s a lot for me. Usually I just seen one or two or a time. These birds nest in the north, that north so radically changing now, in Newfoundland, and upper Quebec, and further west right into Alaska. This is the south…
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Frozen
An early form of writing or waterfowl prints in the ice? “Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing…
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Larus
Small and large: Ring-Billed and Herring Gulls, both members of the Larus genus, down at 58th St Pier off the Brooklyn Army Terminal. In case you missed Charles M. Blow’s column on the anti-inauguration celebrations, it’s very much worth reading and acting upon. We plan to protest on the 20th (good practice for the years…
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Raptor Wednesday
New Year’s Day dawned with a falcon alighting on top of the antenna perch a long block away. I assumed it was our old friend the male American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) who hangs out there a lot. But it was a Merlin (Falco columbarius), which are not as common here in the city. A Merlin…
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One More Time
Because awesome and delightful. When last we saw this Pied-billed Grebe on the Valley Water, ice covered more than half of the pond. The next time, ice covered it all and no grebe was to be seen. The bird presumably took off looking for open water. The water was completely free of ice yesterday, with…
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Preen
Northern Shoveler (Anas clypeata) male working on feather maintenance. There’s preening, and then there’s overweening preening. Did you see the Tiny-Fisted One’s Christmas “card” tweet? Cheeto Mussolini couldn’t even be bothered to gather together his klan o’ grifters for a bogus family picture. Sad.
Backyard and Beyond 