Green-Wood
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Raptor Wednesday
It sometimes seems like I have a raptor sighting every day. So, for the last month, I’ve been keeping tabs. My “daily raptor” is a good practice. In the political shitstorm, it is my daily rapture. Over the 31 days of January I had 37 raptor sightings, the majority of them (21) from my windows.…
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Tuliptree
Remember that Tuliptree (Liriodendron tulipifera) we got such close-up views of back in the spring?This is what it looks like now.These “cone-like aggregates of samaras” as Core and Ammons put it in Woody Plants in Winter, persevere. The hypocrisy would gag a snake, but the Republicans are beyond any shame (and certainly any claim to…
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Red-bellied Woodpecker
I’m seeing, and hearing, more Red-bellied Woodpeckers (Melanerpes carolinus) this winter than Downy Woodpeckers. In the Spartan woods of winter, their loud calls can be the only sound other than the wind. I learned recently that this bird, with its ambiguous name (the Red-headed Woodpecker is a whole other species, and the red-belly here is…
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American Robin
Here’s a bird you don’t see too many of in winter up here. Note the binomial Turdus migratorius, the wandering thrush. Most of them do head south for the winter, but some will stick around, usually flocking together as they wander around for berries and the remains of fruits. Off the lawn and out of…
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January’s Flower
A cultivated Viola we found in a Green-Wood Cemetery planting recently. How can one despair when the earth continually cycles through its great changes? After winter comes the spring. In the dark, there are the stars. In the grey and the sere, there is a flower the color of the sun. Harper’s latest issue has…
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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…
Backyard and Beyond 