Brooklyn
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More Bits, More Pieces
Eumenes wasp mud nest pots. There were a dozen of these mantid egg cases in this patch of Rhus aromatica, the same spot I found the mud nests in. If there were sheep about, I say this was a bit of wool with a medium-sized marble in it. I am, however, hoping it’s some insect…
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Bits and Pieces
Jawbones. On iNaturalist, someone thinks these are Brown Rat. The coin is an inch in diameter. Same coin, different jaw. I pulled out the incisor: rodent teeth keep growing. 6mm long claws extracted from a pellet. Owls swallow everything. I’ve seen our local American Kestrels choked down the entire legs of their bird prey, talons…
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Raptor Wednesday
Squirrels and Blue Jays were in an uproar about this young Red-tailed Hawk. And when this mature Cooper’s Hawk landed briefly on the other side of the same tree, the mammal-avian alarms went haywire. Since I’d used a tree as a blind to get closer for the shots of the Red-tail, I couldn’t see what…
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Catalpa
Hey, wait a minuted! It turns out I’d never seen a catalpa seed before. The pods, sure, all the time, but always already empty. Both the Northern and Southern catalpas are found in our region. They also hybridize. And there are a number of other species in the Catalpa genus that have gotten around as…
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Monday Galls
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres… At the tips of a young oak, small round nestled in filamenty nests. Galls (not Gauls, pace Casesar) with exit holes. Big question in the wonderful world of galls is: what emerged, the gall inducer or the inquiline (parasite)? Not just on the bud tips. Possibly something in…
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Still More Squirrels
I don’t want anybody to get the impression that all the squirrels are being eaten. Ran into all these on Wednesday in a small patch of Green-Wood. In American Kestrel news: yesterday a female was seen from the windows here for the first time in months. She came to our attention because she was calling.…
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Raptors vs. Squirrels
Another adult Red-tailed Hawk, another Green-Wood squirrel. Sunday above Sylvan Water. How many squirrels are in the cemetery? Not as many, I would guess, as in Prospect Park.While looking for interesting birds lately I’ve come across a couple of squirrels doing their best to lay low inside conifers. On Sunday, on the other hand, five…
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Raptor Wednesday
It snowed on Saturday. Twice. In between, I happened to be watching several squirrels capering across the park from my window. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught something fly at a bush and then away, turning up to a tree limb. Several squirrels made a racket up there before retreating. It was…
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Sylvan Raptor
Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday I spotted raptors at the gory work of eating. First up is a mature Red-tailed Hawk in Green-Wood at the Sylvan Water. The unfortunate meal is a Grey Squirrel. I used a very large tree as a blind to get close as the weather went from cloudy to breaking sunny to…
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Sassier!
There’s a suggestion that this is the oldest sassafras in NYC. The tree is still going strong. Now we come to an issue of tense. There are two trees here, just a few feet apart. Are these two actually, essentially, the same tree, a clonal pair, the last of a sassafras colony? There seems a…
Backyard and Beyond 