birds
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Swallow Nesting
That mud-daubed Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica) nest is occupied.
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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…
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Life Along The Delaware Bay
I didn’t make it to the beach to witness the annual rites of spring of the Horseshoe Crabs (Limulus polyphemus). But I did manage a virtual trip with this beautiful book. Life Along The Delaware: Cape May, Gateway to a Million Shorebirds by Niles, Burger, and Dey, with photography by van de Kam, was published…
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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?…
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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…
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Marsh Wren
A early evening walk in Brooklyn Bridge Park interrupted by a small, incessantly burbling bird at the northernmost of the Freshwater Garden ponds on Pier One. I spent quite a while listening and trying to get a picture of this elusive Marsh Wren (Cistothorus palustris), a bird fairly common in marshy areas, but not so…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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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…
Backyard and Beyond 