birds
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Winter Bright
House Finch, Carpodacus mexicanus, in Prospect Park. This is the colorful male; the female is drably stripy. The species is native to southwestern North America. The birds were sold on the East Coast by the pet trade as “Hollywood Finches” until dealing in wild songbirds was made illegal in 1940. Pet store owners, an appalling…
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Brooklyn’s Grasslands
You can’t see them in this picture, but there are thirty-five or so Horned Lark on the ground here at the northwestern corner of Floyd Bennett Field. One of the few open ground bird species on the East Coast, Eremophilia alpestris breeds at the tundra top of North America. The Lower 48 are their wintering…
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Two Habitats
1.) A Rufus Hummingbird has been hanging out by the entrance to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at the American Museum of Natural History. This species, Selasphorus rufus, is more generally found in the Northwest and West, so its continued presence in Manhattan since December has been cause for comment. The bird is…
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Museum of Extinct Birds
The Carolina Parakeet, Conuropsis carolinensis, was the only parrot species native to the eastern U.S. It ranged from the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River Valley, and as far west as Colorado; it sometimes made it as far north as Ontario. The last wild bird was thought to have been shot in 1904. The…
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Urban Tracker
A large paint spill on the Congress Street sidewalk. Perhaps the bicycles wheels zooming through it and down the block weren’t that surprising, but at least two people tracked through it as well. I wonder if this pigeon thought it was food?
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Case in Point
Coney Island Creek this morning before the sun came out. Old barges … a home-made submarine, shopping carts, toxic muck. Pigeons: check. Rats: check, a longshoreman-sized one amid the rocks who turned around to give me the beady eye. But also Common Loons, a Great Blue heron and Black-crowned Night heron on the rotting wood…
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Avian Builders
Avian Architecture: How Birds Design, Engineer, and Build by (the puckishly named) Peter Goodfellow. So what don’t birds build their nests out of? Most of us are probably familiar with the grassy/twiggy cup nests built by a number of songbirds, some lined with moss, some reinforced with mud, like the classic, omnipresent American Robin nest.…
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Navy Yard
The human/nature… intersection? continuum? state-of-being? Whatever you want to call, it certainly is. What it means here on this blog is that I always keep a weather-eye out for manifestations when I’m up to other things. So, checking out the new museum at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I found this Henson Creature Shop animatronic pigeon.…
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Vinegar Hill
Wait a minute!Most of the bogus pigeon scarers are “owls,” as if any self-respecting owl would be hanging out in the middle of the day. This one was a raptor. A nice variation on the theme of useless bird flushers. Right across the street however, a sound in the trees where Vinegar Hill actually drops…
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Spotted Mystery
A storm-toppled tree in the Ravine in Prospect Park made a natural bridge for squirrels and chipmunks before it was sliced up. The horizontal trunk was also being used for a plucking station, as these remains attest. The main predators of birds in the park include other birds, raccoons (but mostly of nestlings), and cats.…
Backyard and Beyond 