Fort Tilden
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Pipilo erythrophthalmus
Eastern Towhee, often more heard than seen because they like the shadows of the shrubs and the woodland floor and the thickness of the scrub. “Pipilo” comes from the Latin for to peep or to chirp. This is a male, seen in Green-Wood.In the southeast, you can find them with white eyes. Up here they…
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Waiting Out the Winter
Two specimens from the general area of back-of-the-beach scrublands at Fort Tilden. Big silk moth cocoons, I think.From a distance, they look like lingering leaves, of which each bush or tree still had a few.
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Mussel-breaking
This Herring Gull* dropped this mussel on the beach twice, to no effect. The first drop on a parking lot, however, was quite successful. *A sharp-eyed reader caught my initial error in calling this a Ring-billed Gull.
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Fort Tilden Autumn
Note: We actually did see porpoises or dolphins swimming parallel to the beach in the strong surf.
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Hopper, Cricket
Good sand-colored camouflage here.Here, not so much, but then crickets are usually tucked away someplace, heard much more often than seen. Grasshoppers and crickets (and katydids, etc.) are in the order Orthoptera, the “straight-winged.”
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Pluvialis squatarola Updated
UPDATED, edited, and corrected: An astute eye and excellent photographer, Deb Allen has let me know that this is actually a Black-bellied Plover (Pluvialis squatarola). The bird is sporting non-breeding plumage, hence the lack of the tell-tale black belly (which, to make things interesting, the American Golden Plover also sports). Sorry about the error, indignor…
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Blooms and Pods
Smooth Aster Goldenrod. Honeylocust.
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Monarchs
The air above Fort Tilden’s narrow reach was full of Tree Swallows and, to a lesser extent, Monarch Butterflies. The Monarchs were being pushed hard towards the east in the breeze. We saw about a dozen of them. One was quite high, noticed as we watched a Peregrine on patrol way up there.Danaus plexippus. Some…
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Merlin Hunting
A plump silhouette on a dead pine. The first rule of birding is to always look at the anomalies. And hope the sun comes out! Because that, and an old concrete gun platform to lean on, makes for a better photograph.This bird was hunting around these dead pines at Fort Tilden. It perched on several…
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Bombus/Solidago
The cold snap combined with the rain took the bees by storm. They were clustered to various late summer blossoms Friday and Saturday, stunned if not lost. But yesterday, the air warmed, and by afternoon the sun was out. The goldenrods at Fort Tilden were alight with a few of these hardy little beasts. Note…
Backyard and Beyond 