A few years ago, a snow person pushed a positively ecstatic snow baby in a swing in one of the Tot Lot playgrounds of Riverside Drive.
Despite the snowy winter of 2015, the population of snow people seems to have declined dramatically. Luckily for the snowman aficionado, the quality remains high. Take a look at this wide-eyed family.
Every year, some version of the central figure presides over West 106th Street between Amsterdam and Broadway.
This was the 2010 incarnation:
The current family triad began, as ever, with the behemoth at the center.
Photo by Maya Rajamani in the West Side Rag, my neighborhood paper. (Click photo for the Rag’s excellent analysis tracing the influences on this snowman. Hint: Think Gerard Depardieu.)
One day, in an interesting twist, the figure suddenly spawned a companion. Notice also the smile that appears on the behemoth’s face after the appearance of the little tyke.
And then, some days or weeks later, the behemoth spawned again. But now, sad to say, the behemoth’s expression has changed to dismay, and, oh dear, is that a look of panic in its now-yellow eyes?
(Thanks to Out Walking the Dog reader, Ken Hittel, for alerting me to the appearance of a third figure.)
All three beings are looking pretty wild-eyed. In fact, the more I look at them, the more worried I feel. I mean, these guys are clearly not sleeping, Take a look at those eyes. I’m pretty sure they’re all three lying awake at night, each in a separate, incommunicable state of high anxiety as they stare into the strange glow of New York City after dark.
Alas, poor snow creatures. Their days are numbered, and every hour brings them closer to the Great Thaw.
Let’s take a moment to look a little closer at each member of our goggle-eyed family of insomniacs, starting with the profoundly anxious little panic artist in the green hat.
The end is coming.
I so wish I could blink.
Sure, I love you. BUT WE’RE ALL GONNA FUCKING DIE.
On a gentler note, the dog posed beneath a sweet snowdog on the retaining wall of Riverside Park.
And back over at West Side Rag, nycmaggie captured a rare snow cat scaling a tree.
I hear there’s more snow predicted this week. Let’s hope more snow creatures follow.
Down in the playground beneath my window, birds gather in the snow to peck and fuss.
So we begin March as we finished February – cold and snowy.
New York has just finished the coldest February in 80 years, and the third coldest on record.
I’ve become fascinated with ice on the Hudson River.
I especially love to watch the tide come in, and see the river flow north toward the great interior. Here is ice flowing north.
It’s easy to forget we live in an estuary, and our mighty river is tidal.
The waterways are filled with ice, ice, and more ice. A beautiful bird’s eye view from an NBC helicopter takes you down the Hudson River to New York Harbor and around the tip of the island to the East River. (It’s well worth waiting for the ad to finish.)
Later today, or tomorrow, I’ll check on my friendly neighborhood behemoth and its sidekick.
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.
I know how bad the storm is for people to our east, west and north. But if there was a blizzard here in Manhattan, I missed it.
Oh, it snowed, all right. Here’s what the city looked like yesterday, back when we still believed in unicorns, elves, and being buried beneath the “storm of the century.”
Disappearing city.
By 6 PM, all city parks were officially closed. The subways started shutting down at 7 PM. At 11 PM, all mass transit and all roads were closed.
– Wait, did you say the parks closed at six?
– Uh-huh, that’s right.
– But at six, there was, like, hardly any snow, and no wind, and great visibility, and …
– Don’t worry about it.
Because this is New York, baby, and this is what a closed park looks like.
Night sledding in Riverside Park! Woot woot!
You can’t tame the night sledders. Not in New York.
Wheeeeeee
Only the wildlife took the closing seriously. The raccoons were nestled all snug in their snow-frosted den.
Raccoons who live in the wall were wearing fur slippers, drinking cocoa and watching the weather on NY1.
All night and this morning, the city was eerily, wonderfully quiet. And the streets remarkably clear, thanks to the snowplows that had free rein of the streets all night.
Broadway this morning, light snow coming down.
The ever-present city hum was almost imperceptible, and even now, late in the afternoon, it’s unusually quiet. Although not in the parks.
The parks, with their five or six inches of fresh snow (a bit short of the predicted two feet), are bustling.
Sledding in Riverside Park – looks like a Currier & Ives.
Everywhere are walkers, sledders, little kids in snowsuits, dogs in boots, and parents hauling children in sleds.
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Last but definitely not least, here is an adorable little man in brand new boots, enjoying his first big snow.
Photo by Christopher Sadowski. Visit The New York Post for more of Mr. Sadowski’s photos.
Last night in Manhattan’s Riverside Park, a coyote was captured by the police. As far as I can tell, this is the first coyote sighting in Manhattan since March 2010 when a beautiful young coyote spent about a month in the city. She quickly found her way to Central Park’s Hallett Nature Sanctuary and made her base in that protected acre in the shadow of the Plaza Hotel before being captured down in Tribeca. In 2012, coyote tracks were found in Fort Tryon Park in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, but I can find no report of a sighting.
Coyotes have been resident in the Bronx for some time now. More recently, they seem to have taken up residence in Queens, and in 2012, a coyote was spotted in Staten Island. Manhattan’s coyotes probably come down from the Bronx over one of the bridges at the northern tip of the island or, possibly, by swimming.
Wildlife biologists at the Gotham Coyote Project are currently studying our coyote population, using camera traps to answer the question: “Where in NYC and its surrounding suburbs can you find coyotes?” The Munshi-South Lab is also involved with monitoring the establishment and dispersal of coyotes in NYC. A camera trap captured this gorgeous image.
Last night’s coyote, a female, resisted arrest, as one hopes any healthy wild animal would do, and led the police on a chase through Riverside Park before being tranquilized and captured in a basketball court. According to the Twitter account of the 24th Precinct, the police had the coyote “corralled inside fenced-in BB court, but so cold out, the tranquilizer in the darts kept freezing!” They had to wait for a second Emergency Services Truck to arrive with “warm darts” as they “wanted to stun it as humanely as possble.”
Police report the animal was unharmed and was taken to Animal Care and Control where it will be examined before being released somewhere outside the city.
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.
On this chilly afternoon, we paid a visit to the Cloisters in northern Manhattan.
We wandered the galleries, and immersed ourselves in the intricate detail and vivid, sometimes lurid imagery of medieval art.
The rosary bead below is just over 2 inches in diameter, and features astonishingly detailed scenes of Christ’s life and crucifixion.
Rosary Bead at The Cloisters, early 16th Century. Image by Wally Gobetz. (click for source)
Not much bigger than a walnut shell, the little box puts me in mind of Hamlet’s speech to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern: “I could be bounded in a walnut shell, and count myself a king of infinite space – were it not that I have bad dreams.” The thought of being bounded in this particular walnut shell with its tiny depiction of martyrdom and crucifixion is certainly enough to give me bad dreams.
The rosary bead also evokes a nutshell that the white cat gives to the youngest prince in Madame d’Aulboy’s fairytale, The White Cat. To win the kingdom, the King’s three sons spend a year seeking the tiniest, most beautiful dog in the world.
One of the older princes buys up all the dogs.
At the end of the year, each of the two elder sons presents a tiny, beautiful dog to the king, and feels assured of success.
“They were already arranging between themselves to share the kingdom equally, when the youngest stepped forward, drawing from his pocket the acorn the White Cat had given him. He opened it quickly, and there upon a white cushion they saw a dog so small that it could easily have been put through a ring. The Prince laid it upon the ground, and it got up at once and began to dance.”
Images of dogs and other animals, real and imagined, domestic and wild, abound at the Cloisters, including birds, lions, fish, dragons, unicorns and a most marvelous camel.
12th Century Wall Painting at The Cloisters. Image by zanderxo. (Click for source)
After we’d spent a couple of hours surrounded by reliquaries and sepulchers, we craved fresh air, and looked yearningly through the windows into the Cloister gardens. But they were closed due to the cold. So we left the museum, our heads full of images, and strolled out into Fort Tryon Park.
We gazed west across the partly-frozen Hudson River, then walked north. We thought about Henry Hudson sailing up the river in 1609 into unknown territory.
Hudson, we realized, was born in the 1560s, not so many years after the creation of that extraordinary 16th-century rosary bead with its still medieval sensibility. The thought seemed to connect us, our river, and our modern city (developed in the wake of Hudson’s voyage) with the seemingly much more distant world of the Middle Ages.
Then the cold air and the icy river prompted us to think of Hudson’s second voyage to the New World, when he entered what is now Hudson Bay, Canada. After barely surviving a hungry winter trapped in ice, the crew, desperate to return home, mutinied. They set Hudson, his son and his followers adrift in a small boat to die of exposure in or near Hudson Bay.
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. 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.
Out walking the dog 