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American Princess whale watch from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, NY (8/20/22)

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    Humid air with temps in upper 80s . Billowing cumulonimbus loomed in the north/northeast sky. A steady southeast breeze pushed in from the southeast. In the four hours we were on the water, the naturalist crew counted 7 individual humpback whales.       On the way out of Jamaica Bay we saw a few terns and cormorants decorating each buoy and one butterfly flying. The beaches of Breezy Point were crowded with great black-backed gulls. Where the bay and ocean converged there were mostly laughing gulls, one or two ring-billed and one herring gull.      On the ocean, heading south along the Jersey shore, a few barn swallows flew around the boat and one warbler-sized bird flew by, bouncing over the bow.      Out in the ocean  we saw mostly great black-backed gulls. Dozens of common terns were plunge diving into the shadowy baitfish bowls that flickered on the surface with hopping fish. The baitfish lured two osprey which hovered for a bit out in the ocean. We saw one least tern as we app
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Palisades Interstate Park, NJ (6/4/2022)

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      Afternoon in the Palisades           A woman shouted at me on the bridge, "Well if you see someone standing there, slow down!" A muscular shirtless man was blocking the bike lane. He would have beat me in a fight. I arrived in the park a little before 12pm.         The sound of indigo buntings singing welcomed me in the southern section. Also, a lot of car traffic between Edgewater entrance and the Englewood Picnic area.  The Dyckman Hill Road between Palisades Avenue and the Englewood Picnic Area, still stripped and clogged with debris from hurricane Ida, was closed to all traffic. So the 4.6 miles of River Road between Englewood and Alpine was closed to car traffic too.       The overly sweet aroma of falling royal paulownia flowers constantly wafted through the park. From across the river in Inwood in late spring you can see the garlands of paulownia blossoms appear in strands around the vertical rock faces.      At each boat basin I spent a good amount of time follo
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Acadian Flycatcher in DC (May 29th 2022)

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     Flycatchers, in my experience, provide exclusively low-angle views. First I wanted to share a few examples of times I suspected to have seen an acadian flycatcher in New York County. These birds did not sing for me. The first bird did, however, create a wheer or whir sound.    (Inwood Hill Park, New York, NY) (The Battery, New York, NY)     On a r ecent trip to D.C. to I was able to hear a very clear and closely sung acadian song. Sung quickly in two(?) notes, the song can be remembered as  peet-sah , or  flee-sick. Reflected on a spectrogram, the sound appears like a sharp upward pointing arrow that bends outward slightly on the way down.           (Recorded in the Merlin App Sound ID at Kenilworth)      The flycatcher was easy to spot and difficult to keep track of as it sang frequently and flew adeptly from perch to perch in the mid-story. Trees of a wide age-range grew here between the eastern bank of the Anacostia River and the Kenilworth tidal marsh. At first the flycatcher
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Palisades Interstate Park, NJ, Peregrine Falcons

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Myself and two friends hiked in the the Palisades Interstate Park, NJ in the spring of 2020. I had hiked here before in the early 2010s. We met in the Alpine Boat Marina parking lot and hiked up to the cliff top. After hiking for about an hour the trail veered very close to the cliff edge and we dangerously peered down to the river below. A moment later we were swooped at by a peregrine falcon. The falcon bent in their wings to slow down as their approached, dropped their yellow legs, and pointed their talons at us. We flinched. The falcon disappeared as a harsh “kaking” sound trailed off with it. It’s likely there were falcon eggs incubating on a ledge below. I returned to these cliffs in the fall and was able to take nice portraits of the male and female pair perched above the precipitous drop to the river edge below. 
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