Backyard and Beyond

I was crouching down at Brant-height when the whole company of them were spooked by something. Their runway was in my direction. They took off not far above my head. One of the last to pass above dropped a very compact and intensely green turd, which bounced off my hat and landed in the grass. Thank heavens for winter!

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The long campaign by the Right to return the courts to their traditional role as bulwarks of reaction is proceeding apace. There’s now a majority of five reactionary Republicans on the Supreme Court. At lower levels of the federal judiciary, there are all the young monsters the Federalist Society feeds to Trump and the undemocratic Senate. They’ll block even modest reforms, much less the truly necessary ones. The knife of the corporate-authoritarian-fundamentalists is at the throat of all our futures.

Consider this on reforming SCOTUS.

The Black-billed Cuckoo is relatively elusive, which is surprising for such a long-tailed creature. “Sluggish and secretive” says Cornell’s All About Birds about Coccyzus erythropthalmus. I was surprised on Friday when a popped into eye-level view at Brooklyn Bridge Park.

I see the Yellow-billed (C. americanus) more often — and that isn’t that often. Both species are great devourers of caterpillars and tend to congregate around outbreaks of tent, fall webworm, and Gypsy moth caterpillars.

The Black-billed’s specific epithet erythropthalmus means “red eye,” although, of course it’s not the eye itself that is red but the lining.

But why “cuckoo”? “Coccyzus” refers to the famous Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus), but our New World birds are unrelated to the Old World one. They also aren’t brood parasites like that Cuckoo so famously is. That Cuckoo lays its eggs in the nests of other bird species, like our Brown-headed Cowbird, and gave us everything from “cuckoldry” to metaphors of humans being the animal that doesn’t make its own nest (Thoreau, Holmes).

But evidently the cuckoos of the Americas were thought to sound a little like the Cuckoo… which really does sound like a cuckoo clock. The name imitates the bird’s sound so well that it’s found in classical Greek (kokkux), modern Greek (kukkus), Latin (cuculus), Italian (cuculo) French (coucou), German (kuckuck), Swedish (gök)… and, taking us down the Indo-European road, Sanskrit (kokila).

Spencer: “The merry Cuckow, messenger of Spring.”

And the famous round:

Svmer is icumen in
Lhude sing cuccu
Groweþ sed
and bloweþ med
and springþ þe wde nu
Sing cuccu

Our cuckoos are declining, due to our chemical/neurological war on life. In the UK, theirs are disappearing; ditto.

I saw a pair of Pigeons, but my companion saw something else in their general vicinity. We were down below the rise of the Heights in Brooklyn Bridge Park, looking up to where the swells live. The hawk was perched on the top balcony, facing in, but with that wonderfully flexible neck glance backwards and sideways and all around the town, as well as the harbor. Was anybody home in that apartment? What a view they would have had! An adult Accipiter. But was it cooperii or striatus? I had a tough time with this bird. The Accipters are one of the harder bird identification problems. Seemed like a straight-edged tail with relatively thin white terminal band on it (Sharpie). But the head sure looked darker than the back (Coop), at least in most of my pictures. The bird made a quick sortie out over the park and back into the trees beside this building, its tail looking very straight-edged. A single bold Starling gave it the what-for.

I called it, tentatively, as a female Sharpie. But let me be the first to admit that identifying the species is not the be-all and end-all of the experience.

UPDATED: Readers beg to differ. See comments below.