On Friday afternoon, before the big snowstorm started, a robin showed up at my window. When I opened it to throw a few raisins on the porch for him, he swiftly flew to the work surface on the side of the barbecue grill that’s right next to the window. That’s where I fed a winter […]
Common grackles stay in New York year round. I saw one the other day, striding around on its long legs and looking cocky. Whenever I see one I take a moment to admire its glossy colors. I usually see a single bird in a park, or just a few at a time — they look […]
In Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach wrote about a gull that “… was not bone and feather but a perfect idea of freedom and flight, limited by nothing at all.” I watched a flock of gulls dashing and darting at the outflow of an open watergate, feeding on something in the roiling water. I couldn’t […]
These Canada geese are tipped over and reaching down with their long necks to gather food plants from the bottom of the shallow pond. The one that’s right side up in the back is a designated sentinel; that’s a goose thing — they take turns watching for danger. Every time you look at a flock […]
At about an inch and a half long, the cicada killer is one of our larges wasps. Their huge size makes them look dangerous, but they are usually not aggressive and do not often sting us. They are solitary wasps that live alone; they lack the hive-defending sting-whatever-comes-close attitude of the yellowjackets they are sometimes […]
I was admiring this photo of a great blue heron and its shadow when I remembered the poem “Heron Rises from the Dark, Summer Pond” by Mary Oliver: So heavy is the long-necked, long-bodied heron, always it is a surprise when her smoke-colored wings open and she turns from the […]
Hawks are migrating now and one of the best places to see them is Cape May, New Jersey. Lots of the birds flying down the Atlantic flyway get channeled into the southern tail of New Jersey and end up concentrated at Cape May Point. They often wait there for weather favorable for the flight across […]
I am on vacation. Here’s a poem by Sara Teasdale entitled September Midnight: Lyric night of the lingering Indian Summer, Shadowy fields that are scentless but full of singing, Never a bird, but the passionless chant of insects, Ceaseless, insistent. The grasshopper’s horn, and far-off, high in the maples, The […]
A pair of Northern Pintail ducks – like a mirror image – with their reflections.
“The moment one gives close attention to any thing, even a blade of grass, it becomes a mysterious, awesome, indescribably magnificent world in itself.” Henry Miller
I keep noticing laughing gulls, Leucophaeus atricilla, around New York and thinking about how they will soon be gone for the year. Laughing gulls that breed in the northeast fly south for winter to the southern Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and to Central and South America.I bet they are beginning to feel the pull. We […]
This lovely wasp can be found drinking nectar at flowers throughout the eastern United States right now. It is a good wasp to have around the garden because the females round up leaf-rolling caterpillars — the kinds that eat your plants — to provision their nests. When it is time to reproduce, the female wasp […]
A while ago I wrote a blog about the fly pictured above.I’d caught it in the unlikely act of blowing a bubble. Although no one knows why flies blow bubbles, theories range from concentrating liquid food by evaporation, to aerating to reduce some kinds of microbial activity, to fly sickness, cleaning the mouthparts, cooling off […]
