The Last Week of Summer

We are heading into the last full week of summer. Soon there will be beautiful leaves. It is that time, described by Sarah Helen Whitman, "when summer gathers up her robes of glory, and, like a dream, glides away."

An autumn preview with mockingbird and persimmons. Click to enlarge. 

Autumn Review

Just leafing through some old fall pictures today.

The soft blur of autumn leaves in the background brings out the street pigeon's eyes.

Click to enlarge.

The squirrel is taking some dry leaves home.

How inviting is this? 

A hawk blends in.

Sassafras.

A mockingbird in a persimmon tree.

"How beautifully the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days." -- John Burroughs.

Winter Bird

 

I saw this northern mockingbird in a cold winter field the other day. It didn't sing a single note which seemed appropriate to the background. Mockingbirds are remarkably vocal at other times of year. They typically sing from February through the summer and again in autumn. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology reports that males may have different sets of songs for spring and fall. The sighting reminded me of the poem, below.

Looking For a Sunset Bird in Winter  

by Robert Frost 

The west was getting out of gold, 

The breath of air had died of cold,  

When shoeing home across the white,  

I thought I saw a bird alight. 

 

In summer when I passed the place 

I had to stop and lift my face;

A bird with an angelic gift

Was singing in it sweet and swift.

 

No bird was singing in it now.

A single leaf was on the bough,

And that was all there was to see

In going twice around the tree. 

 

From my advantage on the hill

I judged that such a crystal chill

Was only adding frost to snow

As gilt to gold that wouldn't show.

 

A brush had left a crooked stroke 

Of what was either cloud or smoke

From north to south across the blue;

A piercing little star was through. 

 

I'm looking forward to the return of the mockingbird's song. Click to enlarge.

Autumn has begun!

A mockingbird with persimmons. Click to enlarge.

I'd like to think that if Walt Whitman were here right now, he'd say: 

"Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling, 

 Give me juicy autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard."

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Parti-colored Starling

Only kidding. It's so cold and rainy outside that I spent most of it sitting in a comfortable chair playing games and some of it creating imaginary birds with Photoshop from my archive of bird images. Click to enlarge. 

Here's another. I call it a green-belted hawk. 

How about a pink-winged mockingbird? 

Or a blue-breasted robin. Had enough? Here's a bird poem instead. 

A Bird Came Down the Walk 

by Emily Dikinson

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw; 
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad,- 
They looked like frightened beads, I thought; 
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim.

And this is what the birds above really look like: 

European Starling -- Sturnus vulgaris

Red-tailed hawk -- Buteo jamaicensis

Northern Mockingbird -- Mimus polyglottos

American Robin -- Turdus migratorius

I Love Pier 6

A wildflower meadow fills much of Pier 6 in Brooklyn Bridge Park. 

It is equally tempting there to wander the flower-lined paths or sit among the blossoms. 

Insects and flowers go together. There is so much activity. Right now there are lots of monarch butterflies gathering nectar from milkweeds. 

And so many kinds of ladybugs you can hardly keep track. The ladybugs are feasting on aphids. The aphids are feasting on plants. 

There are thousands of bees of all kinds collecting nectar and pollen like this honeybee.  

A few mockingbirds are always there making a racket and sometimes swooping into the flowers to catch tasty insects. 

If you follow your curiosity you can have adventures and discover things. I stopped to look at the fruit on this tree. 

I think it's a kind of magnolia that will ripen to look like this one nearby. 

But see that smudge that looks like a bird dropping on the low left leaf? 

Close up it looks like this. 

It's a tiger swallowtail caterpillar! Click to enlarge. 

I find amazing things in the urban wildflower meadow at Pier 6! 

Iris Murdoch wrote in A Fairly Honourable Defeat: People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us. 

The Mockingbird Wing-Flash

Click on the photos to enlarge.  

A northern mockingbird landed on the ground near me and performed this wing-flashing behavior for which mockingbirds are famous. The bird took a a couple of quick steps, stopped, and in a few jerky movements lifted and spread its wings, showing off its white wing patches. Then it took a few more steps and did it again, as it made showy progress across the lawn.

Wing-flashing in mockingbirds is usually explained as a foraging technique that startles insects into view. There are other birds that hunt insects by flashing their wings like this; it's called flush pursuit. But mockingbirds flash their wings at other times, too, not just while foraging. They do it when confronting predatory birds like owls, and they do it in territorial disputes with other mockingbirds, for instance.

In 1960, ornithologist Robert Selander suggested that mockingbirds flash their wings in situations that make them anxious, like when they are on the ground exposed to predators. He thought the wing-flash was a kind of ritualized intention to fly that evolved as a social signal and acquired the coincidental benefit of flushing insects. Selander speculated that individual birds learned to associate wing-flashing with foraging through the positive reinforcement of enhanced hunting success.

Read the original paper "On the Functions of Wing-flashing in Mockingbirds" by clicking here. 

How Cold Is It?

The cold earth slept below;
Above the cold sky shone;
And all around,
With a chilling sound,
From caves of ice and fields of snow
The breath of night like death did flow
Beneath the sinking moon.

The wintry hedge was black; 
The green grass was not seen;
The birds did rest
On the bare thorn's breast,
Whose roots, beside the pathway track,
Had bound their folds over many a crack
Which the frost had made between... 

by Percy Bysshe Shelley -- from The Cold Earth Slept Below

It's that cold! It was a record-breaking -1F last night in Central Park. Meanwhile on my Brooklyn porch, the birds at the feeder have their feathers maximally puffed up and their feet tucked in. Here are my two favorite raisin eaters posing on the planters.

The northern mockingbird. 

The winter robin. 

Happy Mother's Day!

Click to enlarge.