birds
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The Case of the Headless Mouse
It was as cold as a Titmouse on a bare oak branch that morning. The call came in from the Mammal Division. I’d fallen asleep in my suit, Kirkegaard propped against my noise. My tongue felt like it had been ground up for dog-food and probably smelled like that, too, but I shook off my…
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Lord of all it surveys
A familiar silhouette. This Red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) was on a mound of dirt and rubble near Pier 3 in Brooklyn Bridge Park’s still under-construction section the other day. As with all things, the more you practice, the better you get, and in this context it is looking and identifying birds. The raptors can be…
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Spectacular ducks
Hooded mergansers (Lophodytes cucullatus), female above, male below. The male’s wild crest is lowered in this shot, the female’s cinnamon-colored one mostly upright. These birds were in Central Park’s Jackie O Reservoir, where I understand they like to hunt for crayfish. Mergansers — there are two other species in our parts — have serrated bills,…
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Counting Crows and Others
Today’s the start of the annual Christmas Bird Count. This tradition started 113 years ago as a protest against the then popular Christmas Hunts, in which pretty much everything that flew was targeted to be blown out of the sky. A change for the better, I think. The counts go on for the next few…
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Red Robins
Not all of our American Robins live up to their species name, Turdus migratorius. They will stick around through the winter as long as there is available food and water. Nearly a dozen were scouring berries from this tree the other day. They’ll eat hawthorne, dogwood, chokecherries, and sumac berries, among others, and are said…
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Gray, with red highlights
It was as gray a Ring-billed Gull yesterday.But in Brooklyn Bridge Park, if you looked closely, there were flashes of color.Subtle color, mostly.But in a few cases, as in these rose hips, vibrant, almost lurid in comparison.And speaking of lurid, these seem to have been devoured from within.
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Evening Grosbeak
A female Evening Grosbeak (Coccothraustes vespertinus) making a rare appearance in Prospect Park. It has been around for a few days. This was this morning at 10:30. The last recorded sighting of this species was a dozen years ago, and before that, 1989. On the right is another member of the finch family, a Pine…
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Dunlin
My, what long bills you have. Dunlin, Calidris alpina, a species of sandpiper. A winter visitor in our region; these were walking just a few feet away from us on Hummock Pond a week ago. Their breeding plumage, as in so many other birds, is more colorful: rufus backs and black bellies. They breed along…
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Wrack, Canis, Kestrel
From the Brooklyn Bridge, the wrackline is visible on the lawn in Empire Fulton Ferry section of Brooklyn Bridge Park. It’s all over but the clean up in my part of Brooklyn, but Lower Manhattan on the other side of the bridge is still dark.In DUMBO, one of the moss-painted animals left over from the…
Backyard and Beyond 