Brooklyn
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Raptor Wednesday
As I glanced out the window one fine morning… There was a zoom here and a zoom there and a Cooper’s Hawk on patrol took a fairly longish break, for a Cooper’s Hawk, on a fire escape, to watch the local Starlings and Rock Doves and Sparrows recover from their fright. Not a bad shot…
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Prospect 150
This year marks the 150th anniversary of Prospect Park. Of course, the park was not finished when it opened, and it has remained a work-in-progress ever since. When I first started birding I lived two long blocks away from the 3rd Street entrance, where The Panthers watch over the road; like all the ornament of…
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Time Flies
It’s already been a week since we returned from Virginia, where the Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) were present in force. Nests had been claimed and birds were mating repeatedly. Check out the Route 301 bridge over the Potomac: as co-pilot, I spotted six nests near it (three were right over the road on sign towers, two…
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Raptor Wednesday
A scrum of noisy Starlings on the ground suddenly ceased their jabbering. I looked around the sky and the trees. Nothing out of the ordinary, but my raptor senses were activated. I was a few yards from the 9th Street/PPW entrance to Prospect Park. I don’t know if this female Kestrel (Falco sparverius) had spooked…
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North Forty
Return-a-Gift Pond had one singular sensation of a tree frog last week. I wonder if they emerged early in our warm patch, then beat a hasty retreat in the face of the snow? Because reports are that they’re rockin’ now. On the other side of the pond, something is taking over, covering over everything, and giving…
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Crown
Looks like a crown feather of an American Woodcock to me. Just under an inch long. On the snow in Prospect; it was devilishly difficult to get the warm gold of the edging accurately into digital form!And you can, I think, see these crown feathers pretty well here.
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Raptor Wednesday
Red-tailed Hawks are the Old Faithful of NYC raptors. I see them regularly from my windows, passing parallel to the moraine or swirling over the flatlands below. This was one of two in the same tree in Green-Wood recently. Mating and nesting season is a “go”!Here’s a Prospect Park pair, moments after mating. Note the…
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Raptor Wednesday
Sometimes all you get is the general shape of the critter. The big-headed American Kestrel (Falco sparverius), for instance. Other times, you take your best shot. I thought this might be a Kestrel, too. But it sure was spending a lot of time up there, a behavioral characteristic I haven’t seen so much with Kestrels.…
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Sprung
Tossing their pollen into the air… Scott Pruitt, the oil and gas industry operative given the hammer to destroy our environmental protections, claims that physics and chemistry are bunk. (Such a good lesson for students, but, then, the person put in charge of education doesn’t even know what education is; she thinks it’s a fundamentalist-infected…
Backyard and Beyond 