sep 7
Went to Montauk to watch tropical storm Hannah roll in, and to hope for some interesting birds. Didn’t really happen. Visibility was poor; it was foggy and raining. But it felt great to be out there. Birds seen at Montauk Point:
Red-breasted Merganser (1, female)
Double-crested Cormorant
Cooper’s Hawk (1)
Broad-winged Hawk (2)
Red-tailed Hawk (1)
Peregrine Falcon (4, including one with shorebird in talons)
Spotted Sandpiper (1, halfway between summer and winter plumage)
Ruddy Turnstone (6, with every plumage present)
Sanderling
Pectoral Sandpiper (1)
Laughing Gull
Herring Gull
Great Black-backed Gull
Forster’s Tern (4)
Fish Crow
American Crow
Tree Swallow
Northern Rough-winged Swallow
Barn Swallow
(swallows were semi-staging, but then thought the better of it)
And that was it. Observation time: about 1/2 hour, 2:30 or so pm.
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There are a lot of frat-looking people around NYC today – football season has started. Here is a video of a squirrel who has football-baseball recognition disorder:
Catherine:
RE: squirrel: What are they doing when they lay like that? Every once in a while I look out at the feeder area and 1 or 2 are laying against the earth, tail over them like you see in that clip above. What’s going on? Sunning? Is it a squirrel “in heat”? What? It looks really weird and like they are having far, far too much fun. I hate it when squirrels have fun.
RE: storm. The timing, strength and track of the storm made it pretty much of a bust in MA too except at First Encounter on Orleans (Cape Cod) where even there is was a substandard show compared with what they typically get. Though I have done the “run to the Cape in the midst of a hurricane” many a time,dodging flying branches and downed wires all the way, and had it pay off sometimes too, what I really like to search for is storm driven coastal birds inland and so far have managed things like Leach’s Storm Petrel, both phalaropes in numbers; Forster’s and Common Terns (often); and the first official record of Laughing Gull for Worcester County. Today it was a bust, though we did get an American Golden Plover at our Airport with (2) Uplands (see photos on Sheila’s blog). Best bird at local Wachuset Reservoir was a Great Cormorant, known in MA predominantly as a rocky coastal species in winter. And a Bald Eagle (no biggie). Yesterday, pre-storm: (2) Philly Vireos and a Connecticut Warbler.
Mark
Meanwhile, back at the intersection of art and simians:
I just came across this quote from Donald Judd. The very last sentence of his mission statement for the Chinati Foundation:
“Otherwise art is just show and monkey business.”
Whoops, missed Mark’s response: ROGER & ME it is! Good one.