Dipsacus fullonum, syn. Dipsacus sylvestris, is a species of flowering plant known by the common names wild teasel or fuller's teasel, although the latter name is usually applied to the cultivated variety D. fullonum var. sativus.[2] It is native to Eurasia and North Africa, but it is known in the Americas, southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand as an introduced species.

Two mallards walked the path with me until there was a turnoff. On the way back they flew away eventually. There was also a mourning dove. 

It's an overcast, drizzly day. 

Catalpa

 

They rain down flowers on the path, quite beautiful, but I don’t want to step on them. Southern catalpa: “The catalpa has the distinction of bearing some of the showiest flowers of all the American native trees.” The natural range of the tree was in central Louisiana, but seems to have adapted all over America and southern Canada.  

Clover, honeysuckle and mulberry

 

Article in honeysuckle. 

Like knowing names

I showed my son my meditation spot, where the turtle came up and meditated with me, and told me I was enlightened. I'm not going to repost a photo here of that, there's a million posts about that spot on here.

I've googled the trees outside my window. One is a Norway Maple, and the other is European Ash (pictured above).

Blue Flag

Snails

Fragrant

Rosa multiflora (syn. Rosa polyantha)[2]is a species of rose known commonly as multiflora rose,[3] baby rose,[3]Japanese rose,[3] many-flowered rose,[3] seven-sisters rose,[3] Eijitsu rose and rambler rose. It is native to eastern Asia, in China, Japan, and Korea. It should not be confused with Rosa rugosa, which is also known as "Japanese rose", or with polyantha roses which are garden cultivars derived from hybrids of R. multiflora. It was introduced to North America, where it is regarded as an invasive species.

I hear at least 3 of these bird songs walking by the lake.

Flowers

 

Saw robins, mourning doves, mallards and red wing black birds.

Rainy foggy day

 

This was the biggest one I saw. There were some blocks to raise up out of the swamp and they were covered with tiny ones that were impossible not to crunch a few. New York is home to over 100 species of land snails.

Birds

This zoomed in photo doesn't have much information, but you can almost see a little of this Starling's color. 

Above is a Mourning Dove. They have white edged tails. 

Saw red winged blackbird first bird Monday. Today was a cardinal, then starling, then dove.

A birder says she sees the eagle once a month. Mentioned osprey.

Revolutionize your soul

Maybe you can have all the things that you've ever dreamed of
Maybe you can drive your hummer down your gold plated streets with your dove
Of all the things you want to buy, how do they make you feel inside?
You won't find your light in the bargain bin
So you better start your path within and
Revolutionize your soul
(revolutionize your soul)

What if you had never seen a skyscraper or a superstar
Going up and down in an elevator never knowing who you are
Of all the things that you have seen
Do you even know where you have been?
Get up right now and look towards the light this may be your last chance to ignite and
Revolutionize your soul
Revolutionize your soul

Willow Lake

I was walking through Willow Lake and I saw a bald eagle. I saw a robins, crows, doves and saw a yellow bird I couldn't identify and I saw an eagle! White feathers around it's head, long wings, gliding along. I ran to try and catch more of it, but it was gone before I got to the lake to try and see it.

There was a bird call. I wasn’t familiar with so I took out my BirdNET app and it said it was a Northern Cardinal.

Says Translife:

When I was a psychotherapist I worked for a year with male to female non-op trans population in East New York. I would have never known about that side of life. None of them really wanted psychotherapy, they all told me that I just wanted to f&%$k them. One wanted the operation, at the time it was $7k in Thailand or Ecuador. She wanted that money, went to a bar to find someone who would sponsor her. That's why some of them do sex work. I could never figure out who would sleep with people like that, and then I had a really handsome patient who was a sex addict, and would go to the bar. It's a side of life I was pretty unaware of and I'm grateful to the trans staff member who talked openly with me. She had to be in a male prison and it was hard to shower with the other men when she had boobs. Another patient said he liked prison the best, he was the girlfriend of top dog and was treated the best she's ever treated when she was in jail. Hard for her to not want to go back. 

My heart goes out to that population and for the evil current regime to demonize them, use transphobia to score political points horrifies me. I thought about working with the population for a while but I thought it would be too much for me to always be accused of wanting to sleep with them, I found that unpleasant and untrue, and I didn't like to have to say the opposite, no I wasn't attracted to them, that felt like a weird kind of cruelty and none of their business.

I feel like trans hate is unnatural. If you really met someone who was trans and talked to them, you'd realize it was a cruel genetic joke to be born feeling like you were the wrong gender. I read a lot and didn't really read anything good till I read the graphic novel Gender Queer. Which was actually about a woman, who at times felt like she was a man. One of the therapist I worked with went female to male, had top surgery. She would always razz me like a man, it was weird, once the started getting shots of testosterone. The woman I worked with died. There used to be a night they read off every transperson who died in NYC. Many are killed, but there are also health complications and the woman who did sex work get HIV. Just like gay people, some people feel revulsion when they think about it, and don't have the awareness to realize their revulsion doesn't mean they can persecute someone, and the current regime encourages that. I'm hoping this is a step back to which we take two huge steps forward soon. 

Purple & pink

Walked by the lake, red winged blackbirds, thought I saw some type of maybe blue jay. 

Guys working on the bridge. I thought of how the Cyclone is rebuilt many times a year out of wood. This bridge is on top of an old bridge.

Planted some more wildflower seeds

Saw a black Mallard come out of the water and then go back into the water. Saw turtles bobbing their head above the water and taking a look around. The flight path means there’s a new airplane coming in every 90 seconds, over Lefrak City and Forest Hills. Planted some more wildflower seeds. 

Spring & Starlings

I saw a black bird, smaller with specs, looked it up and it said European Starling.

New book on Starling: Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird by Mike Stark, reviewed in the Wall Street Urinal:

“...the species’ deliberate 1877 introduction to New York City by a wealthy “man of leisure” named Eugene Schieffelin, the scion of a pharmaceutical family and an avid student of birds.”

"Chasing the Ghost Bear (2022), writes in lavish detail of the ecological train wreck that swiftly followed as Schieffelin kept importing crates of starlings, as well as house sparrows, skylarks, nightingales and bullfinches.”

Robins

I'd say the bird I most see at Willow is a robin. 

I wake up to a robin's song before sunrise.

American robin is the most abundant landbird in North America (with 370 million individuals), ahead of red-winged blackbirds, including European starlings, mourning doves and house finches. It has seven subspecies. (Wikipedia)

An American Robin can produce three successful broods in one year. (All About Birds) Robins eat a lot of fruit in fall and winter. When they eat honeysuckle berries exclusively, they sometimes become intoxicated.

The oldest recorded American Robin was 13 years and 11 months old.

Skeet

Geese

 

Mallards

You can't really see the green headed mallards, but when I opened by BirdNET app, that's what it heard.

Wikipedia: Males (drakes) have green heads, while the females (hens) have mainly brown-speckled plumage. Mallards live in wetlands, eat water plants and small animals, and are social animals preferring to congregate in groups or flocks of varying sizes. The mallard is considered to be a species of least concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), and, unlike many waterfowl, are considered an invasive species in some regions. It is a very adaptable species, being able to live and even thrive in urban areas which may have supported more localised, sensitive species of waterfowl before development.

I've seen a lot of spring flowers on social media, but these were the first I saw in the real.

Downy Woodpecker

 

We planted wildflowers on our walk to school today and then after I dropped Ruby off, I went down to the lake and planted some wildflowers by the lake: Cosmos, Crimson Clover, Blue Lupine, Baby Snapdragon, Lemon Mint, Purple Coneflower (Echinacea), and Perennials. I turned on my BirdNET app, and got something else besides a red wing blackbird, I got a Downy Woodpecker. I didn't see it. I meditated for 10 minutes, but it's not good with my shoes on and it's too muddy and wet for me to take off my shoes. 

Open!

I was really revving myself up to get angry to break the sign and tug at the chain and look at the fence to see if there were weaknesses I could break.

Instead I told the worker about the joy of being able to walk down to the lake.

I meditated for 17 minutes. I heard a bird, and I opened my BirdNET app and found out it was a red winged blackbird, from the passerine family. 

So many projects, I was going to read all of Thoreau's essays. And I see I've only read one. Next one is The Service, which wasn't published by Dial. 

I listened to the essay. It's so complicated, and doesn't flow easily. He's a contrarian, who sought the military model when others are pacifists. 

Still closed

Park still closed

So I talked to some workmen and they were saying that the pipes are gonna be sending drainage waste water to Whitestone where it’s processed and then released into the sound. The pollutants are taken out, and I asked him where they sent the pollutants and they said somewhere in Pennsylvania maybe.

I don’t think that’s why the park is closed. I didn’t even go and rattle the gate, it looked closed from a distance but now I’m thinking I need to go look again, make sure. When I write for the public, however unread this blog is, I feel an extra need to be truthful and right. Additionally I've been thinking truth is dead during the Trump years, so it's revolutionary to tell the truth in such an era. 

They said the project was for 2 years, so that's probably not why the park is closed. 

Pat Dolan Trail Continues to be closed!

The unlimited time irks me "until further notice" I'm thinking about crossing the Van Wyck and the fence anyway, and it's time to start making phone calls. 

My friend writes from Portland: "...we learned all about a crazy plan to shoot 400,000 barred owls over the next ten years, because they are coming over from the eastern US and outcompeting the native spotted owls for food and habitat. The barred owls will eat anything and have less restrictive roosting requirements and the spotted owls keep a very limited diet and such and so they are unable to compete and are going extinct."

Mexican spotted owl:

There was a majestic fish crow cawing away above us on the walk to school today.

Reading Derek Goodwin's Crows of the World (1983), which starts:

"The crow family, Corvidae, is a numerous, diverse and successful group of passerine birds. It includes such familiar species as the Rook in England and the Blue Jay in eastern North America and also others, such as the Sooty Jay and the African Bush-crow, about which little is known. Corvids range in size from the little lark-sized Hume's Ground Jay to the Raven, which is the largest of passerine birds. Some are dull or uniform black in hue, others are among the most colourful of the world's birds."

There's a substack about birds that mentions crows. 

Flowers are coming soon:

Botanical sexism

Wikipedia: Botanical sexism is a term that describes the preferential planting of cloned male plants in urban areas because they do not produce fruits and flowers that litter the landscape. However, because males produce pollen, areas with only male plants can have high pollen in the air and, therefore, be inhospitable to people with pollen allergies.

Nice birding sub-stack.

The Pat Dolan Trail is closed

The Pat Dolan Trail is closed until further notice due to maintenance and repair needs. (source)

It's a bummer because I had to walk along the road with lots of cars. But it afforded me a view I don't usually have of my beloved lake/pond, and the connecting stream to Flushing bay. 

I walked to Forest Hills, and saw the high school where Simon and Garfunkel went, and my stepfather. I didn't look for a trail to connect with the lake because the walk was longer than I wanted it to be already. 

I stopped at the donut shop, now called Jerusalem Fresh Bagels and got an apple fritter and coffee. They have non-bovine source milks for your coffee. I forgot to ask until after the milk was already in the coffee, I just assumed they wouldn't. It's a Bukharian hangout, everyone shook the hands of one guy sitting there when they came in. I like tight ethnic communities, I think they're wonderful. I saw I'd walked over 5k, so the walk would end up being 11,666. About 4 miles. 

My destination was the one place I know that sells coffee beans at reasonable prices. My grocery store probably charges twice the price for whole beans. I've been thinking maybe less coffee would be good, but I do love freshly ground coffee. 

I haven't been down to the lake because it's been closed off, I'm getting older and it's a colder winter than past winters. I suppose if they're going to close it off they can do it during the winter when there's less use. I haven't wanted to wildcat it across the highway like I imagine the hobos and delinquents do. I do feel an antisocial anger towards authority, and the desire to go into the one space that has lots of trees and birds.