Brooklyn
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Snowy Snowies
The 114th Annual Xmas Bird Count is underway. Brooklyn’s survey was on Saturday. It was a stormy day: any reasonable animal should have been hunkered down at home. Consequently, borough totals were the lowest since 1981: 110 species, with generally low numbers of individual birds. This is continuing to be the Year of the Snowy…
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Fall
I cropped Lower Xanadu out of this image so that you could enjoy the honey-wheat color of this Spartina in the morning sunlight without any distractions.
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Golden Frog
Found dangling in Brooklyn Bridge Park. The helpful tag led me to @seemetellme, an artist who gifts small objects around the city, and, indeed, other parts of world. A sucker for animal art, I took this but left another, non-animal, elsewhere in the park. For someone else’s accidental discovery. (Through the magic of the interwebs,…
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Downy, Honeylocust
The sound was like typist behind a closed door, in an office with thick carpets. It was subtle. In the clamor of the city, we must strive to hear the subtle sounds, and Green-Wood, wind-swept atop the moraine, is a fine place for the subtleties. This Downy Woodpecker (Picoides pubescens) was pecking away at Honeylocust…
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Snowy Owls Here, There, Everywhere
In the last week I’ve heard about half a dozen Snowy Owls (Bubo scandiacus) on the edges of Jamaica Bay, all within the bounds of NYC. Elsewhere, bird watchers in New England, Mid-Atlantic, and Midwestern states are reporting unusually large numbers of these tundra natives. This is a major irruption year, perhaps the largest in…
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Solvitur Ambulando
“And all the leaves on the trees are falling,” this time of year, some of them enormous. My friend and fellow nature blogger Melissa of Out Walking the Dog sent me a photo the other day of a very large face-covering leaf I thought might be American Sycamore (Platanus occidentalis). The very next day I…
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Ruddy
A female Ruddy Duck (Oxyura jamaicensis). Preening here, and rather successfully keeping her usually upright tail, a helpful field mark for this small duck, submerged.
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The Surveyor
Perched on an obelisk. Wind-ruffled.Unruffled by us.And the namesake of an adult Red-Tailed Hawk, Buteo jamaicensis. First year birds will not yet have red-colored tail feathers. But the tell-tale speckled V shape on the back (actually the wings) is another good field mark for the species. The same bird, or just as easily another, since…
Backyard and Beyond 