birds
-
Field Notes: Prospect
I don’t have a telephoto lens, so my shots here on the blog are usually macro and non-avian. But I captured some not terribly bad shots of birds recently while walking around Prospect Park Lake. There is usually a cohort of feral domesticated ducks to be found around Prospect Park Lake. Ducks are birds that…
-
Field Notes: JBWR
There were so many tree swallows out at Jamaica Bay even I could get good shoots without a real telephoto. Birds seen: DC cormorant, Great egret, Snowy egret, Little blue heron, Tricolored heron, Glossy Ibis, Mute swan, Brant, Canada goose, American black duck, Gadwell, mallard, Northern shoveller, Greater scaup, Bufflehead, Ruddy duck, red-breasted merganser, Osprey,…
-
Meanwhile, back in Brooklyn
My dispatches about my Nantucket field trip will continue for several days, but, since I’m back in Brooklyn, I thought I would note the gorgeousness of spring right here, right now. White blossoms (Callery pear, apple, etc.) are falling like sprinkles of snow. The cherry trees are in perfect form. I will try to make…
-
Birding Prospect
As I won’t be getting to Prospect Park for the next several days, I decided I needed an early April census of birds to compare the coming weeks to. Yesterday, I entered the Park at 9th Street and walked down to the Pools and through the Ravine and across the Midwood and the Vale and…
-
Field Notes: Four Sparrow Marsh
Birding, or any other natural history pursuit, depends upon the kindness of strangers and friends. We all learn from each other. This in prelude to saying I have no anxiety of influence about this: I followed the lead of the City Birder and went to Four Sparrow Marsh yesterday. It was my first time there.…
-
Scolopax minor
It was an unusually cold Saturday night, but damn it, it was spring, and the timberdoodles were in town. We went out to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge to listen for them. The American woodcock, Scolopax minor, as it is more formally known, is a shorebird that isn’t. It is related to the sandpipers, and looks…
-
Field Notes: Green-Wood
Top: l-r, monk parakeet; red maple (?); dawn redwood cones. Middle: bald-faced hornet comb; honey bees; honey bee nest. Bottom: leeches on turtle plastron; live red sliders; witch hazel in bloom. Took a walk through Green-Wood Cemetery today. This Victorian garden necropolis sits upon the flank of Brooklyn’s Harbor Hill Moraine, making it the highest…
-
Mimus polyglottos
The Back 40 (Inches) is what I call my rented backyard. It is in the southeast corner pocket of a Brooklyn, NY, USA, block. Next door to the south, over a brick wall, is a double Land Rover parking space sandwiched between two ruins (house, carriage house; all owned by the very idle rich). Next…
-
Natural object: Owl pellet
An owl pellet from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, “collected” on Tuesday. Owls are gobblers, scarfing down their food whole. The undigestible bits of bone and fur and feather are coughed up in pellets. You may have dissected some in school (I missed out), because you can pretty much put together what the owl ate by…
-
Field Notes
Top, left to right, Lacebark pine, crocus, snowdrop. Bottom: Paulownia seedpod, snowdrops, sweetgum seedpods. Prospect Park, Friday morning/early afternoon. Mild weather: overcast early, clearing, little to no wind. Temperature: low 40s by the time I was done, hat off, coat unzipped. I walked half way around the Lake from the south end, and then ran…
Backyard and Beyond 