birding
-
Black-throated Blues
Before I began watching birds, I could identify a bare few of them: cardinals, robins, mourning doves, “sparrows,” things seen on bird feeders or everywhere. One day in the late 1990s when I lived on the top floor of a Park Slope rowhouse, I noticed a small dark bird moving quickly through the tree out…
-
New Views, New Lives, New Camera
Nice contrast between the altricial young of the American Robin, with their eyes closed, featherless, and quite helpless, and the precocial Mallard ducklings, who are ready to rock (and swim, forage) almost instantly. Note how much bigger-looking the background bird is in the Robin nest: could this be a Cowbird or just an earlier hatch?…
-
Swarm
At first they rise like little puffs of smoke from their ground nest. Then more and more of them emerge, small and unwieldy fliers, swarming into the humid air. They are termite reproductives, and a swarm of them brings birds to gobble them from the air. Stand there and watch as barn and tree swallows…
-
Prince’s Bay, Part II
We went out to Prince’s Bay on the southwestern shore of Staten Island to look at the Purple Martin Colony at Lemon Creek Park. Purple Martins (Progne subis) are our largest swallow. On the East Coast, they pretty much nest exclusive in colonial human-made “houses,” which are usually patterned like little human mansions, or, this…
-
Prince’s Bay
A journey into the eroding underbelly of Staten Island.These were a surprise. Peacocks, screaming their haunting woman-in-peril scream on the grounds of the Seguine Mansion. Flannery O’Connor, who lived on a farm with 40 peafowl, said about the carrying voices of these birds, “To the melancholy this sound is melancholy, and to the hysterical it…
-
Hunkered Down
A Mourning Dove (Zenaida macroura), one of the three dozen or so species of birds that nest in Prospect Park. This one is hunkered down before the onslaught of the Googa Mooga bullshit that has taken over the heart of the park for a week and culminates in many full porta-potties this weekend. Farther away,…
-
Barn Swallow Nest
Underneath a bridge in Prospect Park, little mud pellets mark the beginning of a Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica) nest. Interestingly, the swallows seem to be using an old Organpipe Mud Dauber wasp nest as a brace or support.Five days later, the cup-like nest is coming along. A few bits of twig or the like seem…
-
Black-Crowned Night Heron
Nycticorax nycticorax is the most-common heron in the NYC area. It is also the most wide-spread of herons on the planet, being found on five continents. This one was very close to me, and everybody else, in Prospect Park recently, and seemed oblivious to all of us gawkers. As their common name suggests, they do…
-
Assume the Position
Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird, it’s… actually, yes, it is a bird, a small darting thing high high high up in leafy elm. Perhaps a flame-throated Blackburnian, a sky-bringing Cerulean, a red-faced Cape May. Warbler season is upon us, and, even though, as of this writing (Sunday evening), the weather is particularly…
-
Sidewalk Kill
It gets graphic at the end…. I was just minding my own business walking down the grandly named Brooklyn Bridge Boulevard towards Atlantic Avenue, across from the Brooklyn Pokey/Detention Complex. I kept one eye on the sky, because I am half an optimist, and one eye on the sidewalk, because I am the other half…
Backyard and Beyond 