birds
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More Baby Kestrels
You’re darn right there are more baby Ks! Let’s start with more pictures of the 5th Avenue birds, taken on Thursday, two days after the images posted yesterday.The bird on the right, clearly more mature, kept an eye on the south-bound B63 bus as it rumbled to a stop below. I don’t know if there…
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Baby Kestrels All Over
The sound was like the alarm sounds the kestrels make when there’s a crow or hawk in the ‘hood, the high, fast, cycling sound, only it continued for a much longer period. I heard it consistently for half an hour, and on and off for a good two hours in total. By the time I…
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Glossy Ibis
The first time I saw a Glossy Ibis was in Jamaica Bay. I didn’t even know we even had ibis in the Americas. There are actually three species found in the U.S. The Glossy, Plegadis falcinellus, gets up as far as southern coastal Maine during the breeding season. The White-faced is a prairie states breeder…
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Raptor Wednesday
It’s been a while since I’ve had a close encounter with any raptor other than my neighbors the #BrooklynKestrels. On Sunday I walked into this. A Red-tailed Hawk, who had probably bathed earlier and was now grooming, perched fairly low in a dogwood. And nobody was happy about it but me. A pair of Baltimore…
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Baby Kestrel(s)!
BREAKING NEWS: far too many humans are horrible Republicans, excuse the redundancy, but that’s not news. What’s news is I caught a glimpse of a near-fledgling American Kestrel in the corner cornice this afternoon!Looks like a male with those spots. He pulled this ribbon, some leftover from the previous (Starling, methinks) occupants of this cornice,…
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Other Kestrels
The city’s rooftops are alive with drama. Here’s a pair of American Kestrels above Manhattan’s Chinatown. The male has some prey. The Mourning Dove is, what, kibitzing? This photo was taken by a Friend of the Falcons who has been on the lookout for a nest site for this pair. I recently passed another kestrel…
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Nesting
Two Cedar Waxwings (Bombycilla cedrorum) were cutting across the parking lot repeatedly. They were gathering nest material: Seems awfully late, doesn’t it? Many species have already fledged this year. Others are well into incubation. But Cedar Waxwings are very late nesters: they want their young to be hungry around the same time as summer’s fruits…
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Raptor Wednesday
Chasing crows and being chased by crows, our American Kestrels pause briefly together in the late breeding season. There should be youngsters in the cornice nest, but there’s been no external sign of them with these eyes yet. A very quick search for kestrel cavity nest cams in the US turned up little this season,…
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The Ravens
Two weeks ago, the word went out that a family of five Common Ravens had been spotted near Bush Terminal Park here in Brooklyn. It was nearly a week before I personally saw any bill or feather of them, and then only from afar. These two were so larky I assumed they were two of…
Backyard and Beyond 