Word from the Woods

by Peter Schmidt, 5/14/15​

It was Wednesday April 28, at Frost Valley, and I was the a chaperon for my boys’ sixth grade class trip. When I heard all the frogs (spring peepers and I think tree frogs) peeping, I had to check it out. The first night I went by myself; the second night it was me, a teacher, a couple of other chaperones, and 60 kids. The frogs kept peeping the whole time. The camp is four hours north of the city, and although the weather was great, it was cooler than the City and none of the trees were budding yet.

Peter Schmidt, 3/30/15

As I was walking across the campus with my lunch, I saw one of our resident red-tail hawks land by a tree in the quad. I thought it was picking up a branch, as I had seen the pair of them building their nest on the fire escape of a neighboring apartment building. When the hawk didn’t start flying again though, I moved in for a better look. As you can see from the pile of feathers, the hawk had not been after a stick; it had been looking for lunch. Several people had walked by without noticing a thing.

by David Jakim, 2/9/15

An article by The Washington Post today reveals that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is providing $3.2 million dollars to protect Monarch butterflies from extinction. A link to the article, entitled “The Monarch Massacre, Nearly a Billion Butterflies have vanished,” is provided here.

This U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service funding comes shortly after a Petition to Protect the Monarch Butterfly Under the Endangered Species Act was accepted for review. The petition, written by the Center for Biological Diversty, includes our most up-to-date knowledge about the natural history, population, distribution, threats, and the critical habitat needed to protect this creature. The report is based largely upon data, maps, and figures provided by citizen science efforts such as Journey North, the Monarch Larval Monitoring Project, Monarch Alert, Monarchs in the Classroom, The Monarch Teacher Network and Monarch Watch. The petition is a great resource for the study of the Monarch butterfly and a link is provided here.

Later this month we will have our second annual Monarchs in the Classroom workshop in time with the beginning of the Spring migration! Monarch butterflies typically begin their journey north from inland Mexico in late February to early March. They start laying eggs on milkweeds in the southern United States between mid-March and the beginning of May. We can expect Monarchs to begin to arrive in New York by June. Last year, the first Monarch butterfly to be reported in New York City was on May 20th, captured in this photograph by David Jakim.

For up-to-date news on Monarch butterflies, contribute at Journey North!

     Never have I seen anything so surprising on Queens College campus as what I saw when with Into the Woods classes when we set out to record every single bird over a period of fifteen minutes. In November of 2013, we saw the silhouette of a large, hunched-over bird, wearing what looked like a feathered cap, looming over the library bell-tower. “Is that a black-crowned night heron, a fishing bird, atop the bell-tower? What is it doing up there?” At the same time, a Great Blue Heron, our largest fishing bird, fly north by the same bell-tower. On December 6th, 2014, we saw a opossum walk across the crab-apple orchard, apparently to get to the other side (depicted below).

     On every occasion we observed two red-tailed hawks. Red-tailed hawks are relatively large birds of prey, with a four-foot wing span. On one day in 2014, we observed an aerial chase of one hawk flying after a flock of pigeons over the quad. Red-tailed hawks can be seen on campus almost any day. Usually they are perched viligant on buildings and light-posts, or riding thermal vents high in the sky. These birds are monogamous and can live to the age of thirty. A pair of these hawks nested on a fire escape above Colden Auditorium in the year 2012 that was carelessly destroyed by custodial staff. Rumor has it that they have taken to a new nest on the apartment buildings south of campus by Melbourne avenue.

     In 2013, we observed starlings in abundance on trees above the quad. These birds with their winy calls can be seen gathering in the thousands on trees in select days. Starlings, an invasive species, were released in the US by a Shakespeare enthusiast who set out to introduce all the birds mentioned in Shakespeare to our area. A flock of mockingbirds can make clean work of all the invertebrates and seeds on the campus quad.

     Every class recorded dozens of pigeons and several mourning doves, gulls, and house sparrows. House sparrows are probably NYC’s most common species, but are often overlooked. They are a drab species with an unremarkable ‘tweet’ call that typically perches on low-lying vegetation or hobbles on the ground after food.

     Queens College’s resident mockingbird made an appearance on one observation day in 2014. This mockingbird spends a good portion of the year singing in the ornamental garden adjacent to the science building. Another mockingbird has been rearing young with a nest in a tree in the crap-apple orchard adjacent to the science building.

     For more stories on campus birds and animals, see “Notes of a Queens College Naturalist,” a blog about local flora and fauna by David Jakim.

     Queens College has a New Interactive eBird Website for recording observations like the ones made at World of Birds workshops. Please visit the page and contribute to our growing dataset. You can also create your own website for a study area of your own or your class. If you have any you have any questions, you can contact me at David.Jakim@qc.cuny.edu. Happy Hunting!