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October 2026 Ptown, Ithaca, eagles

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There have been some spectacular sunrises at the pond lately. Saturday October 3 In Provincetown visiting Susan. On our way home from walking in the Beech Forest, we saw this fox trotting along the side of the road. It deked into the undergrowth just before it caught up to a woman walking ahead of it. Went to Herring Cove Beach to watch the sunset. Raft after raft of hundreds and hundreds of ducks (maybe scoters) offshore.   Monday October 5 Went foraging for mushrooms with Susan's friend Christie along the rail trail in town.  Searched along the little paths created by coyotes and foxes, off the trail. After the rain a week ago, lots of mushrooms to be had - here's the haul. Sunday October 11  Back in Jamaica Plain. Walking near the boathouse, I watched as a juvenile Cooper's hawk chased a squirrel around and around a tree trunk. They went on like this long enough for me to get out my phone for a video. The squirrel got away. And here's the hawk, afterwards   ...
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Sept 2026 Great Elephant Migration, Garden Landscaping, Eagles

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  Saturday Sept 5 The Great Elephant Migration has come to Boston: a collection of 100 life-sized elephants on the boulevard of Commonwealth Avenue in Back Bay. Adults, babies, juveniles, all heading towards the Public Garden. The elephants are made in India, from  Lantana camara,  to raise funds to remove this invasive shrub; the project is part of a larger international conservation effort. As I chatted with an older couple taking photos, they told me that they saw them when they lived in Thailand. I asked "Wicker elephants?" To which they responded, "No, real ones!"   Sunday Sept 6 Went up to Plum Island on the North Shore to go birding. The first cool day of fall, with that crispness in the air. Not too much happening on the bird front: great and snowy egrets; greater and lesser yellowlegs; tree swallows; northern harrier; possible dowitchers. But it's glorious there, with the ocean waves rolling onto the beach and the expansive salt marsh behind the dunes...
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August 2026 Boston Athenaeum book talk, bird conference, Berkshires

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    For those of you who can't attend one of my book talks, I thought you might like to watch  this video  of my talk at the Boston Athenaeum. August 3-7 I'm at the American Ornithological Society annual meeting in Amherst, MA. Noticing more differences with engineering meetings. At engineering meetings, the chair of each session simply tells each speaker when to start and end their talk. Here, they use a  woodcock peent call  to start each talk and a  laughing gull squawk  to end the talk. The gull is very effective; it's hard to keep talking over a screeching gull. More birdy t-shirts. One woman was taking photos of peoples' shirts, saying she was making a life list of birds she sees on t-shirts. I've also been noticing the range of birdy tattoos people have; in contrast, one of the lab instructors in my department at MIT has a tattoo of the differential equation governing fluid mechanics, the Navier-Stokes equation. And one woman, sho...
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July 2026 How I became a professor at MIT; birds and art

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    When I was teaching, for the last class of the term, I would give a talk on  How I Became A Professor at MIT . I sent it to my friend Marisa the other day and she loved it so much I thought I'd post it here, too.  And, now, back to Nature Notes.  Tuesday July 7 On my way to a bird meeting in Newport RI, I stopped in Providence to go to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) museum and have dinner with a friend. I was tickled by this owl beaker, made in 1556, with a coconut shell body, gilded wings that flap and a gilded head that detaches to form a cup. The label said it was German, and that "Coconuts - shipped from India and South and Central America - were rare in the 1500s in northern Germany but valued as medicinal and restorative. Coconut milk was considered a remedy or aphrodisiac."   The Wilson Ornithological Society meeting was held at a college right next to Newport's famous cliff walk, handy for a little early morning or lunchtime birding. I...
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