Nature Notes

May 2 – Went for an early morning bike ride to the BU bridge and back. Near the Longwood T station saw a group of 3 male turkeys displaying with their tails fanned out, Thanksgiving-style. Stopped at Hall’s Pond in Brookline and took a video just to record the lovely dawn chorus of birdsong. It’s amazing to hear this right in the city – you can see the 5 or 6 story apartment buildings on Beacon Street poking up above the trees behind the pond. May 4 – Walking in the Arboretum in the early morning, saw many more trilliums out along the oak path. On the way back to the entrance to the Arb I saw the first few early lilacs starting to bloom. The Arboretum has a wonderful collection of lilacs, with nearly 400 plants spreading over a hillside to create a mass of color in mid-May. May 5 – As I walked up to a neighbors’ house to return some plastic containers, a robin flew out of the wreath on the front door. When I looked more closely, I saw that it had a nest at the top ...

April 5 - Karen called yesterday to say that she’d seen a great horned owl nest in the Forest Hills Cemetery earlier in the day – very exciting! She was tipped off by a group of birders with telescopes watching the nest. She wondered if I’d like her to show me the nest – absolutely, I’d like to see the nest! We met up at the cemetery around 9am this morning and went straight to the nest, high up in a pine(?), on the crest of a steep hillside. The nest itself was a jumble of sticks, perhaps 30” across, wedged into a crook of the tree, where several branches met the trunk. On the nest, two owlets, all tawny fluff, looking like ookpiks from the 1960s. A sealskin ookpik from the mid-1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ookpik#/media/File:A_sealskin_Ookpik.jpg HazelAB. CC BY-SA 4.0 ] At one point, the owlets looked right at us and you could see the beginning of the tufts of the “horns” on one of them. After a bit, one of the adults flew in, landing in a nearby tree, observing th...

One morning, around 6am, I saw a wake from something swimming along the edge of the pond, and, looking more closely, saw a muskrat, its head just poking out of the water. I don’t often see muskrats at the pond, but when I do, it’s always this time of year. March 3 – Purple flowers at the Arboretum March 4 – Jonquils coming out along Brewer Street; tulip leaves poking through the soil. March 5 – On our early morning dogwalk, I heard a scrambling at the corner of Brewer and Eliot Streets and looked up to see a raccoon clambering up a tree. Once it got to about 15 feet up, it stopped for a bit, looking down at Maddie and me, then clambered further up. After awhile, it disappeared, possibly going into a hole in the tree trunk. Maddie was oblivious of the entire thing, snuffling at some leaves on the sidewalk. Unlike Toronto, we don’t see raccoons here often. March 13 – Daffodils starting to bloom across the street from our house. March 14 – Magnolias starting t...