Green-Wood
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Great Blue & the Democracy of the Heart
Lo and behold, on a recent day I scanned the little islet in the midst of the Sylvan Water and found this Great Blue Heron. Had the bird stuck around all winter? (We’ve have very few days with frozen water). I did see a GBH sail across the Sunset Park plain back in January, heading…
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Pod
Variation on a Kentucky Coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus) pod. “Listen to them! The children of the night. What music they make.” Ok, Bela Lugosi’s Count D is talking about the Transylvanian wolves, but Brooklyn has some interesting early spring night musicians, too. Join me on a Brooklyn Brainery expedition to the edges of the borough to…
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Of a feather
Have you been keeping up with the our ever-expanding knowledge of bird evolution? The linked summary is a good place to catch up on these fascinating discoveries and hypotheses. The findings have been, uh… flying off the fossil beds in recent years and they have turned over old certainties. The barred pattern on the feather…
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Hot February
Yesterday, in Green-Wood, some Cherries and a Red Maple were blooming already.Record-breaking temperatures raise the bar to the new normal. A nice review of climate change now. People, from the rotting orange head of the regime on down, can say it doesn’t exist; they can suppress research; intimidate scientists; but they can’t change the radical,…
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Twiggy
The twigs right now! The twigs! Green, red, orange, brown. Spring is coiled for the spring. This is our old friend Liriodendron tulipifera. Look at those leaf scars! The bundle scars, too, are nice and obvious. In the Native Flora in Winter course I just took at NYBG, some species’ bundle scars were damned hard…
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Raptor Wednesday
See me?Well, I don’t want to be seen. Speaking of being seen! There are lots of elections this year, and although the Republican anti-democracy campaign plows full speed ahead, their nasty little oligopoly isn’t here yet.
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Thoreau Thursday
The purple, duck-billed buds of Liriodendron tulipifera. These are just over 2cm long and were taken from some recent windfall branches. Thoreau seems to have become acquainted with “tulip trees” on Staten Island, where he lived from May-December of 1843, having gone there to tutor Ralph Waldo Emerson’s brother’s children. I read in one source…
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Cling On
It was a very chilly day. FYI: There was such a demand for my Brooklyn Brainery Where the Wild Things Are NYC class that we’re doing it again on February 28th at 6:30.
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Barking Mad Monday
The distinctive bark of Beech (Fagus), its typical smoothness broken up by age.Hackberry (Celtis). On the young trees especially, these nobby, layered, butte-like protuberances are characteristic. The red hairs of a Poison Ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) vine find them a good place to anchor.This is a mature Carolina Silverbell (Halesia carolina).And this strange stuff is Fetid…
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Raptor Wednesday
It is not easy being a large hawk. They’re slow, obvious, and nobody likes them. A case in point: this young Red-tail (Buteo jamaicensis) was being hassled by several Blue Jays, who screamed and shouted in alarm. They were pressing the advantages of the many smaller against the larger one. Even a bold Black-capped Chickadee…
Backyard and Beyond 