I took a look at the field hospital set up in Central Park’s East Meadow by an evangelical not-for-profit called Samaritan’s Purse. Partnering with Mount Sinai Hospital across Fifth Avenue, the field hospital has treated over 300 COVID-19 patients, but will be closing down its NYC operations and leaving under a cloud of controversy.
The organization’s leader Franklin Graham, son of preacher Billy Graham and a staunch ally of President Trump, has repeatedly made homophobic and anti-Muslim statements. And although the organization maintains it does not discriminate, medical personnel are required to sign a “declaration of faith” that opposes same-sex marriage. According to Gothamist, ‘Graham has previously said that homosexuals will burn in the “flames of hell,” described Islam as “wicked and evil,” and railed against the “transgender lie.”‘
Oy vey. Can I just receive my charity straight up, no chaser, please?
Back inside the park (whew), I saw a multitude of robins on the hunt for earthworms. Some worked the ground like tiny pneumatic drills in feathers. Like this fellow.
Before I say farewell, I want to thank my friend Jane for sending me a beautiful handmade owl mask. Jane runs Bridgetown Bow Ties where she makes, you guessed it, bow ties.
At the northeast corner of Central Park is the Meer, a small lake stocked with fish and home to birds.
At the edge of a small island, I saw bright movement: a great white egret.
A mighty hunter seeking prey.
It flew across the small expanse of water and landed on the pathway.
How still it holds itself and how extraordinarily flexible is its neck. We humans have seven cervical vertebrae while an egret has, count them. eighteen.
Solitary human and solitary egret.
After a few minutes, the big bird opened its wings and swooped low along the shoreline to try its luck a little further on.
Hunting, waiting, flying ..
Beautiful.
For more on bird necks, including photos of bird contortionists and a brief anatomy lesson, see Bird Neck Appreciation Day.
Peacocks have freely wandered the grounds at Saint John’s Cathedral in Morningside Heights since the 1980s.
The three peacocks currently in residence, Jim, Harry and Phil, are older gentlemen now, but age is no obstacle to the call of spring. There are no peahens on the premises, yet the three peacocks still rise to the season, displaying their gorgeous tails, squawking and strutting. I went seeking them on this beautiful chilly morning.
Someone peeks around the corner …
I see you.
And lets out a joyful sound. More like an ear-splitting honk to human ears, but presumably a romantic “come-hither” to available peafowl.
Glass-shattering squawk.
The other blue peacock was hidden behind a truck and I had almost given up on finding the third, when a flash of white drew my eye to a far corner of the extensive grounds.
It was Phil, the white peacock, flapping to the fence rail.
He landed awkwardly, then posed for a moment.
And launched himself down onto the other side.
He grazed a bit in the grass.
I left him there and walked away. Again, a flash of white caught my eye. In his quiet corner, just off Amsterdam Avenue, the peacock displayed his beauty for no one.
Thanks to Saint John’s Cathedral for keeping their grounds open to the public and providing the neighborhood with respite from its cares.
It’s cold here in the Northeast. Today the dog and I went down to the river.
Looking south along the Hudson River Greenway.
We were surprised to see the river flowing freely with just a few large ice chunks floating by the shore.
Looking north toward the George Washington Bridge.
You can see ice over by the Jersey shore, but virtually none on our side. Yesterday, the river had an ice crust stretching out to the middle of the mighty waters.
(The images below are drawn from the past three weeks of wintry walks and window watching.)
Nothing stops the dogs or their walkers, not even the deep freeze machine.
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Dogs gotta walk, and birds gotta eat.
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They also have to stay warm. Look at these mourning doves, puffed up like little Michelin men.
And this flock of starlings trying to catch some eastern roof rays on a morning when the temperature hovered in the teens.
The feral cats in Morningside Park are fed hearty meals year-round by well-meaning humans. Feeding cats also feeds rats, which contributes to a burgeoning rat population, which leads humans to set out poison for the rats that eat the cat food which leads to the death of the hawks that eat the rats that eat the trash that humans set out to feed the cats that live in the park. (Read that five times fast.)
It’s a regular “This is the house that Jack built” scenario, except that the cats (indirectly) feed the rats instead of just eating them, as in the old nursery rhyme.
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Here are a couple of our apex predators, viewed from my window, that do their best to keep our rat and pigeon population under control.
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I haven’t seen a Riverside Park raccoon for some time. They must be laying low inside their snowy den.
There may even be babies snuggled up in there, or, if it’s still too early in the season, a pregnant female, waiting for spring. Come spring, I’ll hope to see the whole family out and about on the retaining wall and in the park.
Who’s that walkin’ around here?
Sounds like baby patter.
Baby elephant patter, that’s what I calls it.
– Fats Waller, Your Feet’s Too Big
Ah, it’s a White-throated Sparrow, digging through the leaves for tasty morsels hidden below.
Beautifully camouflaged in the ground litter, the sparrow nonetheless called attention to itself by kicking up an absolute ruckus. If you’ve never seen a little bird dig, it’s quite an impressive flurry of activity with wings, feet and beak all in motion at once.
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White-throated Sparrows have two color morphs, the striking white-striped bird above, and a subtler tan-striped variation.
Here’s what Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “All About Birds” website has to say about the color morphs:
The two forms are genetically determined, and they persist because individuals almost always mate with a bird of the opposite morph. Males of both color types prefer females with white stripes, but both kinds of females prefer tan-striped males. White-striped birds are more aggressive than tan-striped ones, and white-striped females may be able to outcompete their tan-striped sisters for tan-striped males.
Okay, got that?
Here, take a quick look at The Sordid Lives of the White-Throated Sparrow, Kelly Rypkema’s one-minute video:
After mating with whichever-striped chosen consort, White-throated Sparrows build their nests on or near the ground, which makes the eggs and nestlings easy prey for that most adorable of vicious predators, the Eastern chipmunk.
Eastern chipmunk in Central Park.
Yes, these cute little rodents don’t confine themselves to nuts and seeds. In fact, they are notorious nest-raiders of ground-nesting birds, helping themselves to a quick blast of protein in the form of eggs and babies. Interestingly, a 2011 study indicates that some species of ground-nesting birds, notably oven-birds and veeries, pay attention to chipmunk calls and avoid nesting in chipmunk-rich areas.
I don’t know if the White-throated Sparrow eavesdrops on chipmunks. But watching them dig up the leaves, I’d think they could put up quite a defense with those wings and feet. And speaking of feet (hey, sometimes a good segue is elusive, okay?), here is Fats Waller singing “Your Feet’s Too Big.”
My neighbor Janet had an astonishingly beautiful, if rather ferocious visitor for lunch yesterday.
Photo: Janet Rassweiler
She was working in her kitchen at midday, when she heard a strange repetitive banging sound coming from the living room. She moved to the doorway, and saw a bird on her air conditioner. This is nothing unusual in itself. Pigeons and mourning doves often perch there.
But this little bird was no dove.
Photo: Janet Rassweiler
It was a tiny male hawk, or rather a falcon, no bigger than a blue jay, called the American Kestrel.
Kestrels are the smallest raptor in North America with a range from Mexico to Canada. Their populations are in decline in many parts of the continent due to habitat loss and pesticides that kill off the insects they feed upon. Yet the little raptors seem to be thriving in New York City. Like other hawks and falcons that have adapted to urban life, they find that man-made structures serve their needs quite well. While their big cousins, the peregrine falcons, nest high on skyscrapers and bridges, the little kestrel prefers to raise its young in the broken cornices of old brownstones and mid-rise apartment buildings. Their prey includes insects, small mammals and birds, like the sparrow Janet’s visitor brought for lunch.
Photo: Janet Rassweiler
The banging Janet heard was the sparrow’s head flopping up and down on the metal air conditioner as the kestrel pulled with its beak while holding the body down with its feet. (To move more quickly through the slideshow below, hover over the image, then click on the arrows that appear.)
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When the bird had had enough, it flew off with the body in its talons, leaving behind only the beak and part of the head.
Photo: Janet Rassweiler
 I couldn’t tell if the brain had been eaten or not, although I rather guess it had, since brains are apparently chock full of nutrients. Perhaps the kestrel ate a quick blast of brain food before carrying off the rest of the sparrow to feed a nesting mate.
The abandoned head reminded me of another dramatic wildlife story that unfolded on my block. One day a few years ago, I noticed a fledgling sparrow hopping about inside the large planter of a nearby building. The little bird was clearly not yet able to fly, and was probably being fed by a parent hiding in a street tree. I made the decision not to intervene, since the planter seemed as safe a spot as any on a city street for a still earth-bound baby bird. Early the next morning, the decapitated dead body of the baby sparrow lay on the sidewalk. The head was nowhere to be found. (I wrote about the fledgling’s predicament, and my own, in Baby Birds and Animals: To Help or Not to Help.)
Had Janet not witnessed the kestrel eating the sparrow, she would be left puzzling over the mysterious appearance of a bird head on her air conditioner.
What a city we live in, my friends. What a city.
What a world.
All photos in this post courtesy of Janet Rassweiler.
Spring is officially here. Red-tails are nesting, peacocks are showing, and male mallards are acting downright crazy.
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Trees are still mostly bare, which means you can more easily spot wildlife.
And feral life. The feral cat colony in Morningside Park seems out of control this spring. The cats are everywhere around the pond, stalking ducks and other birds.
But that’s a topic for another post.
For now, let’s put away the ice rescue ladder, and celebrate the arrival of another spring.
Below are links to a few of Out Walking the Dog’s odes to springs past:
I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw.
Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
But Hamlet, dear, this is easy.
Hawk.
Hawk with squirrel, Riverside Park, NYC.
Handsaw.
Handsaw.
More difficult in low light and at a distance is to know a hawk from a handbag, or more specifically, a plastic grocery bag.
Hawk.
Handbag.
Many is the perched hawk I’ve seen that, upon closer approach, has resolved itself not into a dew, but into plastic caught in a branch. (Click each photo to enlarge.)
More rarely the process reverses, and a plastic bag metamorphoses into a hawk, and flies.
These metamorphoses from animate to inanimate, from hawk to handbag, and back again, are among the peculiar pleasures of watching urban birds.
New York City’s three Cathedral peacocks have already begun their annual spring courtship displays in which they unfurl their insanely long, dazzling tail feathers, hold them up in a giant fan, and rotate slowly to enchant the ladies. Here is a video I took a few years ago of one of St John the Divine’s peacocks in fine form.
The boys will be displaying like this all spring and summer, but who do they hope to woo? The nearest peahen is several miles away at the Central Park Zoo or the Bronx Zoo (from which one of the pealadies briefly escaped in 2011).
Still the peacock boys display to anyone and no one. Yesterday, the white peacock was showing his tail in front of the shed that serves as their roost, while one of the blue peacocks stood alone at the end of the steep driveway, just a few feet from Morningside Drive, with his tail in full sail.
Tails furled or unfurled, peacocks seem to have an innate design sense.
Here the white peacock displays a striking horizontal elegance.
Down the driveway, his friend advocates for the power and beauty of the vertical.
For more on the Cathedral peacocks, stay tuned. Or visit our archives.
I’m not sure what to make of the collection of twigs amassed by the Cathedral Red-tailed hawks atop Saint Peter’s canopy.
I posed the question on Twitter, and love the response I received from Robert of Morningside Hawks: “If they were predictable, they wouldn’t be wild. And sometimes they do weird stuff because they know you’re watching.”
For now, at least, the hawks seem to be focused on refurbishing the old nest on Saint Andrew’s mossy shoulders.
When I arrived at the nest this morning, it appeared empty. But as I crossed Morningside Drive to enter the park, I looked back toward the Cathedral in time to see a hawk swooping in from the north to disappear from view behind the saint’s head. Although I could no longer see the bird, I could see twigs moving as the hawk rearranged nesting materials.
Then the hawk hopped onto the old man’s head and looked out over the park and nearby streets.
What a view.
Somehow, the poor saint looked especially sorrowful this morning, and the hawk, well, hawkish.
After a few minutes, the big bird spread its wings and soared off to the southeast.
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.
Black snowball with fresh snow
Is it a meteorite? No, friends, that’s New York City snow.
Black Snow Emission
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.
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.
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.
It was cold and snowy in the city on Saturday, so the dog and I bundled up. He’s the one with the blue boots. I’m the one with the blue hat. (My hat recently inspired some guerrilla art.)
Gray and furry.
Gray and furry,
Morningside Park is always magical in the snow.
The little pond was frozen solid.
A little boy and his father stopped to throw snowballs onto the ice. (Click photos to enlarge.)
Cross-country skiers slid across the fields, and dogs sniffed and romped.
Heading up the great stone staircase, we spied three feral cats well camouflaged by snow and bare bushes. Â Can you spot them? (Click the photos to enlarge.)
A white cat is balanced in the twigs, a gray cat is perched in the wire fence, and a white-and-black cat sits on the snow to the right.
Saint Luke’s Hospital loomed over us as we continued our climb.
Sledders were at play on the slope just below Morningside Drive.
On the street, the back of Saint John’s Cathedral invited us to explore.
We walked over to Amsterdam Avenue and the unfinished towers at the front.
We entered through the animal gates.
“Oh, I want to eat his eyes,” exclaimed one of these lively little girls as they circled the snowman below. “They’re made of Hanukkah gelt!”
Leaving behind the would-be cannibals, we headed into the Cathedral grounds.
And finally, three as Phil, the white peacock, preened inside the peacock house.
A group of teenagers came clattering up the path. The girls squealed and shrieked when they saw the peacocks, running toward them to take pictures. The birds, accustomed to paparazzi, ignored the girls, even the one shivering in a strapless dress and bare legs. Humans. What can you do?
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We gave a last look up in search of the neighborhood red-tailed hawks, but no hawks today. Just Gabriel forever blowing his horn atop the Cathedral as the stony apostles wait patiently in the cold.
Yesterday morning was a gorgeous overcast day on Eastern Long Island. Snow was forecast, but hadn’t yet begun when the dog and I headed out on Flying Point Road to the ocean.
Deer tracks on the beach, below.
There were several sets of tracks. Why are deer visiting the beach?
In early October, when I was last here, the beach was littered with the remains of tiny creatures.
Yesterday it was mostly swept clean of flotsam and jetsam. But not entirely, of course. Here and there were a few skate egg cases and bits of sea weed greens.
More oddly, wilted flowers that might have come from Miss Havisham’s wedding bouquet had washed up all along the beach.
Continuing the theme of remains, we found a female ruddy duck lying dead on her back just off the road by the bay.
Her death allowed me to look more closely at a duck’s body than I’ve ever been able to do before. I’ll write more about this beautiful little bird later, along with photos of her extraordinary feet and the serrated edge of the underside of her bill.
Out walking the dog 