birding
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City Kestrels
Or: The Importance of Falling Apart. An intriguing passage in Bernd Heinrich’s The Nesting Season about German architects incorporating nesting spaces for such cavity nesters as Eurasian kestrels, jackdaws, and swifts, in new buildings got me thinking about Bob DeCandido’s project of tracking American kestrel nest sites in old buildings in New York City. In…
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Chicago Lights
My friend Cathy has been finding dead birds in the Windy City, victims of high-rise glass towers and bright lights. The migration seasons in particular takes an enormous toll. Here’s some more information about how skyscrapers kill and what can be done about it. This is a picture she sent me: it’s an Eastern bluebird,…
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Hot Spot
This part of the Ambergill in Prospect Park has become a hot spot for watching birds bathe. I saw my first indigo buntings of the season here this week, and many other species are coming in to dip and shake those tail feathers, including all manner of orioles and warblers. The shallow pools on the…
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Confessions of a warblerholic
The wood warblers have returned, as they have done for millennia unnumbered. They are coming out of a night sky thick with migrating birds, thickets that show up on Doppler radar like weather patterns, falling on the green islands of the city to eat furiously before catching another tailwind to fly north to breed. And…
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Listening
Last Sunday, I led a group of twenty on what I called the Listening Tour in Prospect Park. The tour was sponsored by Proteus Gowanus, the interdisciplinary gallery and reading room, which is currently hosting an exhibition called “Paradise.” We were in Prospect for the simple reason that it is a paradise of birds. A…
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Two birds
Near the dog bathing beach at the Upper Pool in Prospect Park, I found a couple of noteworthy birds the other day:The most common bird species in the park is surely the American robin, Turdus migratorius, which you can find on the meadows and in the woods and everywhere in between. This particular one stands…
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Starlings
A pair of starlings, Sturnus vulgaris, on the Nethermead were locked in combat the other day. Literally locked, as one had the other’s legs in its grasp. The fight went on and on, until the captive one either broke free or the captor relented. Then they flew off in the same direction, and it looked…
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Look around
It is a truth universally acknowledged that I don’t have the camera & lenses for great bird photography. (You can find plenty of far better shots on the web). But one of the reasons I do this blog is to convey the message that everyone, anyone, can be an observer of wildness. Fancy gear is…
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Rockaway
Friends who live in the Rockaways showed us around last week. This barrier beach of a peninsula juts out of the soft underbelly of Queens as the sheltering arm of Jamaica Bay. It’s thickly settled on its eastern end, but Jacob Riis Beach and the Fort Tilden section of Gateway NRA provide some naturalist splendor.…
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Calvert Vaux Park
Calvert Vaux was born in London (the family name rhymes with “fox”), immigrated to America, worked with Andrew Jackson Dowling, the founding father of American landscape architecture, and published Villas and Cottages, a landmark of American neo-Gothic design. Vaux’s great claim to fame, however, is teaming up with Frederick Law Olmsted to work on both…
Backyard and Beyond 