Brooklyn
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Raptor Week II
Red-tailed Hawk. Buteo jamaicensis: “of Jamaica,” where the original specimen was taken. The most common road-side and soaring hawk of North America. To recap, the common name is particularly unhelpful when you get a yearling like this one. The brick-red tail feathers don’t appear until after the first year of life, if they’re the one out of…
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Raptor Week I
Cooper’s Hawk. Accipiter cooperii. William C. Cooper’s hawk. The species was named in his honor by Charles Lucien Bonaparte. Cooper was a conchologist and founder of what became the New York Academy of Sciences. Bonaparte was a Bonaparte, a nephew of the Emperor, and an ornithologist who explored the U.S. in the 1820s. You can’t…
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Calyces
The calyx of the American Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana) is this beautiful cross shape. A few stay on the tree as the fruits come down, but most fall with the fruit. There’s still some fruit on the trees. Most of it, though, is on the ground, and some of that is well beyond eating stage. We…
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Raptor Wednesday
A Cooper’s Hawk on a winter’s day. Here’s Audubon’s rendition. Normally, I find JJ’s birds on the strangely attenuated side, longer and skinnier than they are, probably a result in his pinning up their dead bodies to illustrate them. But I like his capturing of the patterning on the back here very much. Another thing…
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Fevers
A couple of the eight Fox Sparrows (Passerella iliaca) I ran into recently. That’s a lot for me. Usually I just seen one or two or a time. These birds nest in the north, that north so radically changing now, in Newfoundland, and upper Quebec, and further west right into Alaska. This is the south…
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Frozen
An early form of writing or waterfowl prints in the ice? “Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing…
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Larus
Small and large: Ring-Billed and Herring Gulls, both members of the Larus genus, down at 58th St Pier off the Brooklyn Army Terminal. In case you missed Charles M. Blow’s column on the anti-inauguration celebrations, it’s very much worth reading and acting upon. We plan to protest on the 20th (good practice for the years…
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One More Time
Because awesome and delightful. When last we saw this Pied-billed Grebe on the Valley Water, ice covered more than half of the pond. The next time, ice covered it all and no grebe was to be seen. The bird presumably took off looking for open water. The water was completely free of ice yesterday, with…
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Preen
Northern Shoveler (Anas clypeata) male working on feather maintenance. There’s preening, and then there’s overweening preening. Did you see the Tiny-Fisted One’s Christmas “card” tweet? Cheeto Mussolini couldn’t even be bothered to gather together his klan o’ grifters for a bogus family picture. Sad.
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Raptor Wednesday
Always note the anomalies, the bumps.Red-tailed Hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) on railing. Showing the “belly band” nicely. Way down in the flatlands, 1st & 40th, Raven country.Another day, another sighting. Big shoulders, relatively short, squared-off tail. The mottled white patches on the back, sometimes a little more clearly in a V pattern, are another good sign…
Backyard and Beyond 