Nature Notes

Every summer the Massachusetts College of Art and Design has an outdoor student sculpture exhibit along the bank of the Muddy River, near the Longwood T stop.  One of my favorites this year is this ginormous bug. The poppies in my front garden were lovely in early June. And the tree in the front yard was covered with blossom; this is the view from my bedroom window.  In mid-June, I spotted a female wood duck with her ducklings on the bank of Leverett Pond, near the bike path. The sun sparkling on the Charles River early one morning, from the BU bridge. On an early morning walk I saw 4 swans flying, circling the pond to get enough height to fly over the treetops.  I could hear the swoosh of their wings as they flew past me a minute or two later. I liked this feather I spotted on the ground on a walk in Concord. At an event at the Boston Nature Center, one of the staff brought a great horned owl - fantastic to see it up close, with its complex delicate feather coloring. Big...

The highlight of May was the grey screech owl that I saw almost daily in one of the trees on the Arborway, near the traffic rotary at the end of my street, hanging out in the hole in the middle of a rotted branch that had been pruned earlier in the spring.  It was a delight every time I saw it, sometimes standing still, sometimes turning its head.  I loved seeing its feathers, mottled grey and white, with streaks of black, perfectly camouflaged against the bark of the tree.  And it was amazing how it just stayed there, day after day, in spite of the three lanes of traffic which got heavier and heavier as more and more people got vaccinated, the pandemic waned and people returned to their usual routines.  Then, in the middle of the month, the grey one was joined by a smaller, reddish one, probably a male (in raptors, the females are larger than the males).  Screech owls nest in tree cavities and I wondered if the pair had nested there.  At the beginning of J...