mammals
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Mammal Monday
Usually raccoons sleep off the night’s revels in a conifer, as here in Green-Wood, but when in Rome….Someplace, for instance, where the evergreens are in short supply, as in this section of Pelham Bay. A sharper eye than mine pointed out that this hammock is fundamentally made up of poison ivy vine. In the news:…
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Mammal Monday
There’s not much cover in Green-Wood this time of year.
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Mammal Monday
This squirrel was first spotted with a mouth full of leaves. It was lining this arboreal snug. The big leafy bundles in trees, sometimes mistaken for bird’s nests, are summer squirrel nests. (Actually, none of our birds build nests of leaves.) In winter, squirrels want something more substantial: a tree hole, an attic…. A squirrel…
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Mammal Monday
The signs of raccoons are everywhere in Green-Wood, particularly at the base of trees where they leave their poop piles. They sometimes also leave an impression…. We were surprised to spot this one sleeping in the rough on a chilly day. You’d think it would be snug in some tree hole somewhere waiting for the…
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Bat Outta Green-Wood
About three weeks ago, I was surprised by a bat in Green-Wood batting around in the early afternoon. It zipped about in a clearing for a moment or three. It was an Eastern Red (Lasiurus borealis). Too bad I was in the bat’s shadow. Just heard about a more recent sighting: warm days can bring…
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Mammal/Mushroom Combo Monday
A melanistic variation on the ubiquitous Eastern Grey Squirrel, Sciurus carolinensis. These darker ones are said to tolerate colder weather better. Another notion has it that urban environments, with less predators, are also more likely to see greater numbers of both black and white variations of S. carolinensis. Our first example is digging up a…
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Mammal Monday: Whistlepig
I’d just passed two woodchuck-sized holes under a tree when the lumbering run of a groundhog-in-the-fur caught my eye. The animal stood up for the best view in front of its burrow. Marmota monax, mammal of many names. Slightly easier to see if you click on this image to make it larger. *** The children’s…
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Remains of the Night
Something got this bat, or else something else (a car?) got it and then something ate of it. I’m struck by the delicate structure of the rib cage. *** The entomologist and curator Alex Wild said this on Twitter yesterday after the disaster in Brazil: “The loss of the Brazilian National Museum to a preventable…
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There Were Whales
D. Graham Burnett’s The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century is a whale of a book. He traces the… evolution (?) of whale science from the cutting room floor of factory ships by scientists who were more or less creatures of the industry, flensing their way through interesting collections of…
Backyard and Beyond 