Last week, snow blanketed the gardens of Saint John the Divine …
Today much is revealed.
All over the city, for better and for worse, things buried are coming to light.
Take a look at the bike buried beneath snow in front of my building.
Turns out it’s more than a bike. It’s at least a bike and a half. Who knew?
These are benign examples. In truth, once things start emerging from their hiding places, there’s no telling what may come to light.
Be careful out there.
This morning, a stunningly beautiful, spring-like day popped out of a snowy winter.
The sky is blue and the snow is, well, black.
How does the pristine and elegant substance of a week ago …
… metamorphose into the dark, satanic mountain range of today?
When urban snow reaches this stage, it doesn’t even melt. My theory is that there are now more solid filth particles than there is water in this Substance formerly known as Snow. As most New Yorkers know, these mini-Himalayan ranges will diminish only to a point. The remaining black metor-like blobs hang around long after the surrounding street snow has melted. A particularly notable example was a giant blob that threatened to become a permanent resident of 108th Street in 2010.
Today was a good day for hawk-spotting. Over on Morningside Drive, one of the Saint John the Divine red-tailed hawks perched above a saint near its picturesque nest before sailing west out of sight.
Last winter, daily hawk sightings led me to found New York City’s Hawk-A-Day Club. This year, fellow New York nature blogger, Matthew Wills of Backyard and Beyond, has seen peregrine falcons for five days straight in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. But my Morningside Heights sightings have been surprisingly scarce this winter. So I was delighted to see a red-tail on the Cathedral.
The Cathedral nest, which has been occupied since 2006, undergoes renovation each year by the nesting pair. Last year was an especially active year of redecoration, albeit with some questionable design choices. Long, dangling pieces of string kept me worrying all season long that one or another member of the growing family would become entangled. (Look to the right below.)
But it was the sight last spring of a hawk wrestling with an unwieldy cardboard box or large paper bag that really led me to question the red-tail pair’s eye for design.Below the hawk flies toward the nest with its catch.
For more on hawk cardboard-wrestling, visit last year’s How to Build an Urban Hawk Nest.
I’ll be keeping an eye on the nest, along with my trusty walking companion, who would rather be scrounging for food. (Mysteriously fallen street strawberries don’t count, in his book.)
Next week I’ll once again have a camera that will allow me to take some more detailed shots than has been possible with the iPhone that has been my sole camera for the past six months.
That will be fun.
Winter world.
As the dog and I step off the sidewalk into a narrow path dug between snow mounds at the corner of Broadway and 108th Street, the sound of distant honking stops me in my tracks. Not the usual traffic sounds of Broadway, but the calls of wild geese. I shade my eyes and look up in time to see a large flock of Canada geese – an uneven, dark V, followed closely by a long single line – disappearing to the southwest over the solid old apartment buildings of Riverside Drive. “Oh,” I say out loud, struck by beauty.
At the top of the stone staircase that leads into Riverside Park, the dog pauses to show off his red shoes.
The red shoes: Dance, little dog, dance.
We descend the staircase, and enter the white winter world of a snowy city park. Everything is strangely quiet.
Central Park after a snowfall.
Only a couple of dogs are playing in the 105th Street dog run.
Down by the river, a solitary runner runs.
But where are the rest of the animals?
We retrace our steps to the path above, where a squirrel scoots across the top of the snow and leaps onto a tree trunk.
The little creature leaves behind a scribble-scrabble of footprints in the snow, the record of many such forays out of the safety of the trees. Three crows call from the top of the plane trees, then fly, one at a time, out of the park toward Riverside Drive. Two house sparrows chirp.
And that’s it. No hawks, no juncos, no woodpeckers, no robins, no flocks of sparrows, no chickadees, no titmice. Where is everyone?
And then we hear a high-pitched call: “Tsip, tsip, tsip.”
Winter’s bare branches make it easy to find the caller: a female cardinal, perched in a tangle of branches beneath the retaining wall. Although I usually see cardinals in pairs, today the brilliantly colored male is nowhere to be seen. The lovely bird kept just outside the range of my iPhone, so here is a photo from last winter of two females picking up spilled seed beneath a bird feeder on eastern Long Island.
The Northern Cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) stays with us year-round, and even in the depths of winter, the male keeps his brilliant plumage. (Thank you, Rob Pavlin, for the beautiful photo below.)
Cardinal in Central Park. Photo: Rob Pavlin
Cardinals are particularly stunning against a snowy background, but they’re gorgeous birds in any season.
Cardinal in autumn in Central Park’s Conservatory Gardens. Photo: Melissa Cooper
Just look at that red.
Cardinal in Central Park, early winter 2012. Photo: Rob Pavlin.
You don’t often see animals in winter sporting such flashy colors.
Still, it’s not unheard of, is it?
The red shoes ride the elevator home.
This post is for Nick and Zuri.
Again this morning, snow.
Here are a few images from our snows of the past month.
Esau waits for me in Riverside Park.
Dog prints on the retaining wall high above the park.
Who’s been walking on the wall?
In Morningside Park, a feral cat makes its way along the cliff near the iced-over waterfall.
The cat’s white legs look like little ice falls.
The pond in Morningside Park is sometimes frozen.
Other times, some kind of bubble machine prevents it from fully freezing.
Bubbling pools in Morningside Pond.
After the snow, the sky clears and a hawk flies over the snowy landscape of Central Park.
Out walking the dog 