mammals
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Chestnuts
American Chestnuts (Castanea dentata). Be careful handling these burrs, or pods: the spines are v. sharp! Most of the nuts produced by these young trees are scrawny, undeveloped things, quite fibrous inside, but they still seem to disappear into the maws of the squirrels (Sciurus carolinensis).This one was vocally displeased with my poaching of the…
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Woodchuck
Who doesn’t need some whistlepig every once and a while? Old-ivory yellow teeth and all: a defining characteristic of the Rodentia are their pairs of continuously growing upper and lower incisors.Gnaw, gnaw!
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George Bird Grinnell and Others
I went up to Woodlawn Cemetery to visit the grave of Herman Melville, and I stumbled upon George Bird Grinnell. Grinnell was born in Brooklyn and tutored by Lucy Bakewell Audubon, widow of John James, at the Audubon home in upper Manhattan. He started the first Audubon organization, believing the name should live on. Bird…
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Adios, Texas
Talk about “road-side hawks”! A Swainson’s Hawk (Buteo swainsoni). Loooong wings. Didn’t look like there was anything on the road, yet the bird must have been attracted to something before oncoming traffic flushed it (we, of course, had already pulled off to the side of the road).Another roadie, the Harris’s Hawk (Parabuteo unicinctus), telcom-poll percher…
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Three Mammals on an Early Spring Day
Eastern Gray Squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis).Eastern Chipmunk (Tamias striatus).Raccoon (Procyon lotor).Tail-grooming (de-fleaing?).
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In the Spartina
They seemed to be taking whole reeds, perhaps to line their nests in the rocks. Rats can be awfully finicky about their nests. Rattus rattus, baby. Updated: Evidently actually Rattus norvegicus. See comments.
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Mammals, Too
We were pretty much surrounded by a Gunnison’s Prairie Dog colony, and heard them call from the meadow across the stream. A couple were sitting upright in the distance. Then a herd of Elk (Cervus elaphus) charged across the colony, surprisingly quiet, through the stream and into the misty meadow beyond. We also saw two…
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Homeboy Mammal
First glance on rounding the corner of a shady tree: I thought this was a hairy cat on the loose. I mean, a big, low-slung hairball, one of those Persians who’s been to Paris, if you know what I mean.Woodchuck. Whistlepig. Groundhog. Land beaver. Marmota monax. In Green-Wood. I’ve seen them there before, but this…
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Who’s the Bos?
I am inordinately moved by the fate of the Aurochsen. Bos primigenius were the wild ox of Eurasia, painted by their hunters at Lascaux and elsewhere tens of thousands of years ago. These big beeves with the great horns were the ancestors of domesticated cattle, of which there are many breeds, including some with Aurochsen…
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Your Morning Chipmunk
Eastern Chipmunk (Tamias striatus) in the Vale of Cashmere. Cute as the dickens, but you know, without any predators they can become quite a problem, being predators themselves.
Backyard and Beyond 