Birds All the Time

      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 ar...

     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 th...