Good to see the Laughing Gulls back in town. I heard them overhead for a couple of days before seeing any. 
These were out at Gravesend Bay and Floyd Bennet Field.
An immature Ring-billed Gull, a mature Greater Black-backed Gull, and a Brant let you know that Laughing Gulls are on the smaller size. (The GBBG is the largest gull in the world, bigger even then a Red-tailed Hawk).
Leucophaeus atricilla, means, strictly translated, white-dusky black-tail. The stunning black head is breeding finery.
Posts Tagged 'Floyd Bennett Field'
Laughing into Monday
Published April 29, 2019 Fieldnotes Leave a CommentTags: birding, birds, Brooklyn, Floyd Bennett Field
Meadows
Published October 12, 2018 Fieldnotes Leave a CommentTags: Brooklyn, flowers, Floyd Bennett Field, plants
The protected grasslands at Floyd Bennett Field are looking fine in autumn.
You can fill your screen with these by clicking on them.
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Much less of a pretty picture: on the rise of illiberal democracy there and here.
Park-ing
Published August 4, 2018 Art Culture Politics , Fieldnotes Leave a CommentTags: birding, birds, Brooklyn, Floyd Bennett Field
Did you know the verb parking originally meant setting up strips of park, often with trees, in the center or the edges of roads? Then those trees along the road were roped into being used to tie up horses. The meaning of parking thus changed: it became what you did to your horse. From there it was a short and fateful jump to the urban hellscape of cars, including cutting down the original trees to make room for more “parking.”
I’m sorry to ruin your day. 
So here’s a Black-crowned Night Heron standing on a flooded patch of tarmac that was formerly a runway. Not much consolation, but some.
Have you gotten to that long NYT Magazine piece blaming “human nature” for the radical disruptions of global climate transformation? Say what? What about, you know, politics, or the way political power is distributed, or who actually runs things? Not to mention which humans have used up all those carbon-releasing resources. Hello?
There are other critical reminders out there in the way of this publishing event, but these two are particularly good:Kate Aronoff and Naomi Klein both cut to the quick.
(Rich does provide a perfect illustration of ideological blindness, though. He, and his paper, simply can’t see the neoliberalism for the fire.)
Raptor Wednesday
Published February 7, 2018 Fieldnotes Leave a CommentTags: birding, birds, Brooklyn, Floyd Bennett Field, Green-Wood
A Red-tailed Hawk flew by with a Gray Squirrel hanging from its talons, the long bushy tail a banner of mammalian defeat. The hawk landed in a tree and spent maybe a minuted pulling at the mammal with its beak, no doubt ending its life. But the bird then moved to another part of the same tree, without its prize. Prey is hard-gained this time of year, so I figured the bird was stashing the prey to give to another. There was no other hawk in sight, and I had places to go, so off I went. Then, two hours later when I returned to the scene, Sylvan Water in Green-Wood, a Red-tail flew out of the same tree. Then suddenly there was another in the air. The two adult birds — both with red tails, that is — wheeled around each other, and landed in different trees right next to or near each other. So I think my guess was right. The first bird was a male, who had taken the squirrel in anticipation of giving it as a gift to a female. Such gift exchanges preview mating. Didn’t see or hear — its screechy and very brief — that, but it’s not too early for Red-tails to get in the mood.
Classic Red-tail sign: big white or very pale blob in a tree. Many’s the time a distant white spot in a winter tree has turned out to be one of these buteos.
Red-tailed Hawk bonus: this time at Floyd Bennett Field, also at a good distance.
And another in the Bronx. I’ve had 26 Red-tail Hawk sightings (counting very conservatively, in three boroughs of NYC) since January 1.
Water, Water, Not Everywhere In Winter
Published January 23, 2018 Fieldnotes 1 CommentTags: birding, birds, Brooklyn, Floyd Bennett Field
Brant (Branta bernicla), geese who visit the region in winter.
A trio of Canada Geese (Branta canadensis) in the mid-zone for scale. These two geese species share a genus and look superficially similar from afar.
This was fresh water rippling out into Jamaica Bay, and everybody was happy to get some. Last week it was still pretty cold: parking lot puddles, 9/10s frozen, were also being hit up for fresh (?) water by Brant.
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 it this weird look of lumpy, alien planet set design for a low budget sf production. There’s some rose in there, but is that the only thing? It’s like some northern kudzu.
“The path of most resistance.” This article on the Women’s March is inspiring. Audre Lorde, quoted here on activism: “It means doing the unromantic and tedious work.” The author of this Harper’s piece continues, “This will never be the stuff of cinematic grandeur. It’s never satisfying, in part because it’s not enough. It should never feel like enough. But involving insufficiency as an alibi is just as dangerous as self-satisfaction or comfortable despair–the very things Lorde warned us against.”
Kestrels, Kestrels, We’ve Got Kestrels!
Published March 28, 2016 Fieldnotes Leave a CommentTags: birding, birds, Brooklyn, Floyd Bennett Field, kestrels
Male Falco sparverius at Floyd Bennett Field, where the grasslands, currently mown, can often be a good place to see this most common of NYC raptors. This one is particularly painterly with those spots (and the cloudy day).
Here is a female, farther away from the camera. Her wings don’t have the blue of the male birds. 
A different male at the other end of the runway. 
Note the very worn edges of this bird’s tail feathers. Time for a molt? That black band at the near-edge is a good way to distinguish males from females, who don’t have it, up in the air when you can’t see their topsides.
These pictures are a week old. More recently, on Saturday, we saw a Kestrel plucking what looked like a sparrow of some kind in Green-Wood. And on Sunday, another Kestrel was hovering over the mown grasslands at the Salt Marsh Nature Center.
Blue-winged Teal
Published March 27, 2016 Fieldnotes Leave a CommentTags: birding, birds, Brooklyn, Floyd Bennett Field
A drake Blue-winged Teal (Anas discors). Surely one of the most handsome of all ducks.
The species is a long-distance migrant, some heading deep down into South America. They’re also early birds, one of the first to arrive and the first to leave. I rarely see them in NYC.
Here’s the hen. The pair were dabbling in Return-a-Gift Pond last weekend. They are rather smaller than the omnipresent Mallards, which are actually quite big waterfowl.
The 2nd Atlas of Breeding Birds in NY State (2008) notes that their decline in the state has been marked. There were no birds breeding in NYC; the first atlas 20 years earlier showed them on Staten Island and Nassau country. Shallow ponds are their preferred habitat. The loss of agricultural land may be one of the reasons they’re doing poorly here. Also, of course, as migrants, they get it at both ends as their wintering grounds in the Caribbean and South America are chopped up, polluted, etc. Hunters in the U.S. bagging their “four-bird limit in 15 minutes” don’t help much either.
Brooklyn’s Pine Woods
Published November 28, 2015 Fieldnotes Leave a CommentTags: Brooklyn, Floyd Bennett Field
On a wet day.
Backyard and Beyond 