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Showing posts from 2015

Nature Note #155: Review of the Year

What a strange year it's been. Again. As I sit at home with my parents in Massachusetts where I started off 2015, I'm doing what all people do at this time of year; looking back at the accomplishments, failures, regrets, ideas, and events that defined the year. Normally, I reserve this space for "Bird of the Year" and gloat about how my journey to getting 200 species of birds on my life list has been the triumph of my year. Instead, it was finding full time work and graduating from a stay-at-parent's-home adult to a fully fledged living my own life adult. It's been a strange journey and while I've been happy with how I've been doing, I have also been looking forward at what's next. 2016 obviously. But that's just another year. Another set of 366 days (it's a leap year, don't cha know?) to fill up with happiness, anxiety, rage, tears, sweat, thought, and experience. This year, I've decided to give a rundown of the main events for

Nature Note #154: Shadow Flight (Part I)

As the countdown to the first snowfall begins in earnest, another flurry is happening in our skies every night. As the light leaves pastels of pink and purple along the horizon, American ( Corvus brachyrhynchos ) and Fish Crows ( C. ossifragus ) have started their nightly journeys across the sky. Here in Syracuse, you usually see them as you travel home from work while waiting for the lights to change. Huge crowds heading over route 690 to some place beyond where they spend the night in great roosts, clustered together amidst the encroaching city. Why they cluster together like this during the winter is a bit of a mystery. Some hypotheses suggest that it could be a means for crows to gather information about potential food sources in the surrounding areas, while others suspect it has something to do with safety in numbers. Either way, such a huge gathering of these black birds seems ominous and sinister. After all, throughout history, crows and their cousins, the ravens have always

Nature Note #153: River of Blackbirds

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Blackbirds might not be the most charismatic group of birds, but they are filled with plenty of characters. From the songster orioles to the clanging grackles and the bastard cowbirds, blackbirds or "icterids" as ornithologists call them are a diverse group. Baltimore Oriole This past weekend, Alison and I headed over to Three Rivers in Baldwinsville to check out the bird life. While it wasn't our first choice for birding (Beaver Lake was closed so that volunteers could set up a Halloween-related festival), we were determined to find some birds. The leaves had peaked and were drifting off the trees one by one. In the distance, gunshots rang out precipitously. Perhaps a flock of geese had mistaken an array of decoys for peaceful comrades while the hunters lay out of sight, waiting for the right moment. While listening to the calls of robins and cardinals in the trees before us, a bubbly whistling caught our attention. Just below the robins were some smallish black

Nature Note #152: Foxy, Foxy

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Fox Sparrows ( Passerella iliaca ) are big birds both structurally and in terms of how little I get to see them. I got to see one briefly in a tangle of twigs and leaves while I was walking the trails of Beaver Lake this afternoon. I was partially trying to get away from the city for a bit, while also trying to figure out what to write about. As I wandered, I wondered and as I wondered, I worried. I worried about not consistently updating my blog twice a month and what that would mean for my two regular readers (three if I'm lucky!) I worried about my writing skills not improving and that I might not be getting anywhere. After a worryingly indeterminate amount of time, I noticed I was just was walking along a trail towards god knows where so I doubled back and headed up the Bog Trail. At a little over half a mile, the trail snaked into a boardwalk that headed out over a maple bog and out along the pond. As I walked along, I could hear the jingling calls of White-throated Sparrows

Nature Note #151: Those Small Moments

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Sycamore in the Stony Brook I feel like every once in a while you can appreciate nature in small doses. Nature has become big and that's not just because it's marketing team got better (we can thank National Geographic for that certainly). People wanting to "experience" the great outdoors, buying organic food, life listing rare and unusual species, hunting locavores (as in locavores hunting for wild food, not Ted Nugent's third favorite thing to shoot from a helicopter), and many other grandiose and specific things. Taking a sip While it certainly feels amazing knowing just how maple sap rises due to temperature fluctuations or why amphibians can breathe through their skin, taking time to appreciate a moment of pure presence can impress upon someone all the more. Take for example Monarch butterflies ( Danaus plexippus ). You see them gliding along passageways of tarmac and concrete, flapping furiously along roadsides looking to refuel not at Micky D

Nature Note #150: Rambling on Roadsides

A flutter of wings caught my attention as I left Wegman's this morning. A Monarch butterfly ( Danaus plexippus ) flapping furiously in a southwesterly direction skimmed past my peripheral and into the bright morning sky. So small and under appreciated, yet this butterfly is simply doing what tradition has commanded it to do for thousands of years. What I've been missing the past few weeks has been an opportunity to escape the city to see the wild spread out and away like in a forest or a marsh. This is a silly idea of course, as nature doesn't simply exist solely "out there", but all around us. As one tuned into the natural world, I cannot help but notice the constant changes the world experiences day by day and season by season. With the autumn equinox having passed midweek and the prospect of leaves emblazoned against the branches that once funneled nutrients back and forth between sky and root, one can see clearly that change has arrived. As I've com

Nature Note #149: A Familiar Grind

As the dog days of summer trudge on, those of us in the world of adult responsibilities grind along too. We have jobs, appointment, and lives to lead regardless of how hot the weather and how inviting the sunshine is outside. Despite this, there is a familiar sound that punctuates the noise and grind that surrounds our everyday lives. Even as I've grown more and more used to life here in the city, noise still finds a way to puncture through. Recently I was listening to an episode of Roman Mars's podcast,  99% Invisible  where he discussed the difference between noise and sound. Noise is a sound or series of sounds that are annoying or disturbing to one's overall experience of the world, while a sound itself was the expulsion of air waves of a certain pitch and frequency that we recognize coming from a specific source, regardless of the impression it has on our experience of the surrounding world.  There is certainly no doubt that cities are noise centers. Rumbling traff

Nature Note #148: The Feeling of a Pleasant Summer Evening

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Imagine a quiet river ambling by on a warm summers eve. The sun is starting its downward shuffle towards the horizon and a warm glow fills the skies above. I have to be honest, I was worried about finding a quiet spot to go fishing in the city or even just outside.  Cities, in my opinion, are atrocities (no pun intended). Entirely too many people shunted into many small spaces with the expectation that they will get along with one another. It's an introverts nightmare and personally, I have made it my mission to get outside the city of Syracuse as much as possible. The city itself isn't all that bad. I'm still not used to being in such close proximity with my fellow species, Homo sapiens and don't know if time will change that, but until then, I will continue to escape to the countryside come the weekend. I'm lucky to have so many interests in the outdoors and have been blessed with an internal drive to experience nature up close. Whether it was Beaver Lake a fe

Nature Note #147: Why Nature?

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There are a lot of interesting things people have chosen to write about in this world. Some focus on the politics and problems of the world at large, while others write about their pet hobbies and ideas. I have chosen to write about an obsession of mine which is as large and varied as the world it encompasses. Those of you that visit regularly (despite the slow updates) know that the subject this blog covers is all things nature.  But why nature?  It seems like a simple question, but really it can be answered in so many ways. I will never know what precisely perked my interest in nature to start with. Maybe it was the day I watched a blackbird play over the garden hedge in Wales as a young boy, or the first time I ran terrified from my fishing rod when I caught my first ever Bluegill ( Lepomis macrochirus ). Perhaps it was the first time I canoed with my family down the Sudbury River taking in the smell of the water, the Red-winged Blackbirds ( Agelaius phoenicus ) calling

Nature Note #146: Encounters with Audubon's Mammals (The Melanistic Squirrel of the Carolinas)

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Sciurus Niger, Black Squirrel When you move to a new place, it often comes with new sights and scenes. One of the more unexpected examples has been the color of the local squirrels. Squirrels in the northeast are already named for their predominant colors (with the exception of flying squirrels), but as the picture to the left shows, they also come in black. While they seem like a different species, these "black" squirrels are actually a melanistic morph of the regular Eastern Grey Squirrel ( Sciurus carolinensis ). In the past, this didn't prevent prominent scientists and naturalists from labeling them as such however.  Even though color morphs were certainly known about in the 1800s, there was still the constant taxonomic war known as "lumping and splitting". Even today, there are still battles and hypotheses being waged about certain species either being regarded as unique from one another or as simply being a subspecies. In biology, species and su

Nature Note #145: Encounters with Audubon's Mammals ((The Floridian Wood Rabbit) of Syracuse)

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Lepus Sylvaticus,  Grey Rabbit* For the past few weeks, I have the regular pleasure of watching the behavior of a common mammal species out the back of my apartment. Eastern Cottontails ( Sylvilagus floridanus ) are a common sight on the "green patch" that fills the space between my apartment window and the Worker's Compensation Building not ten feet beyond.  D espite living in a mid-sized city in central New York, wildlife abounds on small green patches around the city, but are only noticed by those with the sharpest eyes and greatest awareness of the potential of their natural surroundings. My initial impression of the city was that it was a barren concrete wasteland populated largely by pigeons and sparrows, with rats running rampant in the sewers below. The only potential interlude to the hulking grey masses and hard rivers of tarmac lacing their way through a highly altered landscape are any number of city parks, playgrounds, and gardens. Syracuse is blessed

Nature Note #144: The T'wa Plovers

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Memorial Day weekend has come and gone and I thought I'd share a quick update about some of my findings over the past week. I wanted to talk about plovers in particular. Why you might ask?  One reason is that they are ridiculously adorable. Another is that they are wonderfully talkative with their piping voices. Despite their notoriety and popularity with birders, shorebirds in particular are vulnerable to declines in population due to sharp declines in suitable migration stopover sites, food depletion, and in some cases, illegal hunting on their wintering grounds. Fortunately for us, many shorebirds species are still very common and the two birds I want to talk about in this posting are probably some of the more recognizable of the shorebirds (depending on where you live). They are the Killdeer ( Charadrius vociferus ) and the Piping Plover ( C. melodus ). I've talked about Piping Plovers on here before, but I don't think I've ever specifically focused on either my o

Nature Note #143: The Green Patch

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So for the past few weeks here in Syracuse, it has been interesting seeing just how much nature permeates our surroundings and our daily lives. Syracuse is a lot greener in places than I ever expected an urban environment to be. The first thing one notices is all the concrete and stonework and cars and other industrial creations that fill the air and surroundings with their noise and looming presence. I've read about urban sprawls and jungles in books and magazines and seen it described in glowering tones on environmental documentaries, but seeing it up close and living in it, makes you realize that things aren't always as they seem. Sure the typical urban wildlife can be found in droves. Squirrels bound from tree to tree, while ants crawl between cracks in the sidewalk. The big birdy three consisting of Rock Pigeons ( Columba livia ), European Starlings ( Sturnus vulgaris ), and House Sparrows ( Passer domesticus ) swoop through the streets and trees, filling most pockets wi