mammals
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Mammal Monday
The front door.Looked too small for a backdoor, so let’s call it a window. (No mammals were woken up for these photos.]
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Mammal Monday
New York City’s City Hall Park squirrels are as bold as lobbyists. They come right up to you when you’re taking a picture of, say, a holly in the snow, and make their demands known.Elsewhere, however, the smaller mammals keep to the night, but that does not necessarily mean they make it through the night…
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Mammal Monday: Wait, How Many?
Judging from the poop, Green-Wood is over-run with Raccoons (Procyon lotor). They need some coyotes. During the day, you can occasionally see a few way up in a pine or other conifer, sleeping, scratching. Less frequently, you can see a whole family in their swank condo wondering who the hell you are.
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Mammal Monday
Deer tracks on the continent. Found on the grounds of the Bartow-Pell Mansion, in Pelham Bay Park. (FYI for you out-of-towners: the Bronx is the only part of New York City that is not an island.) On nearby Hunter’s Island, part of the same park, but no longer an island. Last time we were here…
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Jawbones
Rodent. Which one? Found amid an owl (and other?) pellet bonanza recently.Jaws a-plenty, in fact, but no skulls. The last time I found a good patch of pellets, there were lots of skulls. Some owls will eat the head first, then the body later. Inch scale here.And this one with the long incisor. When I…
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See Under: Trees
Exploring the shady underbellies of conifers this time of year can reveal some deep… uh… stuff. Yes. there’s quite a lot of excrement, for one thing, although that is by no means confined to the base of conifers. I’ll spare you pictures of the turd-like turds, but here are a couple of interesting byproducts. Not…
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Squirrel, Noise
As befitting a cemetery, Green-Wood can be very quiet, barring the constant faint background hum of the universe — or traffic as we call it here in Brooklyn — and the intermittent roar of passing planes. I heard this squirrel before seeing it. And clearly it saw me. Another squirrel was foraging on the ground…
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Boots For Scale
I wear a 9/9.5. These are rabbit prints. There were some other curious prints in the snow on the frozen Bronx River that I could not figure out. No tail, as in a muskrat, and although rather canine-looking, (but too big for fox?) they looked too close together for coyote. Perhaps a cat whose prints,…
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Red Squirrel Alert!
A Eurasian Red Squirrel (Sciurus vulgaris) scoping out the scene in Copenhagen’s Assistens Kirkegard (cemetery), where Søren Kierkegaard is buried. There were two; they were pretty camera shy. This squirrel species is wide-spread across Eurasia, but is suffering in the UK from a disease introduced by imported Gray Squirrels from North America. Declines have also…
Backyard and Beyond 