Jamaica Bay
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Dead Horse Bay
Yellow-rumped warblers and Green Darner dragonflies before we got to the landfill edge.One of two Royal Terns, Thalasseus maximus, both with bands on their left legs. Not a commonly sighted bird in the city; I didn’t know what they were at first. The smaller Common and Little Terns we see here during summer have already…
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Jamaica Bay and Colombia
One of the male ospreys who breeds in Jamaica Bay was fitted with a GPS tracker this migration season. The bird is now “wintering” in Colombia. I put wintering in quotes because although migratory birds head south to avoid our winter, they go to places in Central and South America where winter is an extremely…
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Far Southern Queens
Yellow Queen Honey from Greenpoint. To the Honey Festival at Beach 96th and the Boardwalk on the Rockaway Peninsula yesterday, where the beach was swarming with Black Saddlebags dragonflies. Like Monarch butterflies, the Black Saddlebags are migratory. (Until fairly recently, I didn’t know that some dragonfly species migrated. Natural history is an arena of near-infinite…
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No pipeline in Jamaica Bay
There is a petition against the plan to put a natural gas pipeline through Gateway National Recreation Area, with a large metering facility at Floyd Bennett Field. These kinds of things do not belong in a place that was set up, to quote the original Congressional legislation, “to preserve and protect for the use and…
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Friends In Need
The city and federal government are teaming up to work on Jamaica Bay together. Note especially this graf: “The new partnership also calls for the creation of a conservancy or friends group dedicated to the bay, to encourage philanthropy. Similar conservancies have helped other large parks in New York City, including Central Park in Manhattan…
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The Grossly Ironic Visitor Center
A post in honor of Le quatorze juillet: One might think that conservation and conservatism have much in common, but not in this country, where conservatism is a perverse amalgam of the defense of privilege, corporate oligarchy, talibany fundamentalism, racism, and misplaced class resentment. A U.S. Congressman, with no public input, is attempting to change…
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Patriotism
The very red eye of an adult Eastern Towhee feeding its noisy, grey fledgling, well into a thicket but visible through binoculars, a caterpillar meal. A Cormorant sanding on the beach with its lower bill wedged into a hardshell clam. Who had who there? A Buckeye, keeping low, but unmistakable with that eyespot pattern.Low to…
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On Jamaica Bay
Aboard the Golden Sunset out of Sheepshead Bay with the American Littoral Society’s Jamaica Bay Ecology Cruise. Looking across Jo Co’s Marsh towards You Know Where, which is about nine miles away as the crow flies. Speaking of flying, JFK is immediately to the right, launching planes one after the other, including the somewhat terrifying…
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Skates
Sun-dried, the remains of a skate repose on that great depository of all things, the beach, Jamaica Bay branch. This may be the Little or Common Skate, Leucoraja erinacea. Cartilaginous like their relatives the sharks, skates reproduce by laying eggs, unlike their near look-a-likes the rays, who bear live young. Rays also have longer, more…
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The day in birds
My day in birds began just after 5 a.m. when I woke to the pre-dawn chorus of the local House Sparrows. Argh! I grumbled something and rolled over. Between rain clouds, I went out to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in the middle of the day. Some thirty-seven species of birds and three mosquito bites. Many…
Backyard and Beyond 