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[urbpan]

Here in the Northeast the unusually cold weather has given way to unseasonably warm weather. I'm not complaining.

We still do have three full weeks of calendar winter, and two full months of "it could snow at anytime" actual New England winter, however. The natural landscape is stark and greenless. No new plants have grown in almost a year and the last green grass bleached to tan a few weeks ago. Scattered lone conifers and muddy patches of moss are the only green to see. Those, and the green of the muddy river, which could be algae, or could be green dye put in by the sewer department, to trace the flow of their leaky lines.

The waterfowl are acting like it is spring, conspicuously organizing themselves into pairs. The Canada geese are extra aggressive, and the male mallards boast shiny green heads. Their multi-species clumps have broken into discreet groupings--the American black ducks together here, the buffleheads over there, the single pair of mute swans far from everyone else. As I said earlier, there are no new plants, so all these birds are scrounging the muddy bottom for seeds, insects, any organic particles that can be food. A newly dead mallard drake, floating or resting on the shallow mud has appeared in the last few days, just across from our home. Did he starve, fall victim to disease, or was he killed by a red-tailed hawk who was then scared away from his kill?

Crows seem to be rebounding from the plague of West Nile virus that made one of our most common urban birds downright scarce this winter. I haven't seen any huge roosting flocks, but individuals seem to be scouting out the city, and groups of a couple dozen are sometimes seen at the city's outskirts. Red-tailed hawks, also vulnerable to West Nile, are still fairly often seen, and for some reason there are more Cooper's hawks around, as well.

I rode my bike to work for the first time in 2004 this weekend. Mourning doves and robins are the obvious creatures seen on that stretch of sprawl. It is light enough late enough that I can make it almost all the way home without needing to use my lights. I apologize for my winter complaints, though I am grateful to have my love of warm places galvanized. Florida seems like a nice place to move--plenty of wildlife sanctuaries and captive animals to take care of...

Comments

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

Every day that I don't have to run down the street chasing after my frozen-off nipples makes me happy.

The chickadees are playing Marco Polo now too!

[mr-orgash.livejournal.com]

Here in the Oz of the Midwest, aka Hell Central, the devine Ms Em and I discovered a hawk or falcon nesting in a big Sycamore tree. We could see the bird fixing the next in preparation for the birth yet to come...

AND

You're married now, you should have figured out by now some way to keep Cottonmanifesto's nipples from freezing, y'know?

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Moving her to Florida (or Costa Rica, or Puerto Rico or even California if we can afford it) in several years is my plan to keep our nipples in place.

[mr-orgash.livejournal.com]

The thing about Costa Rica is funny, a guy i sorta know lives there (and I lived there for about a year) -- Alan Weisbecker (you can read his books or he has a web page too), and his big grip is the surcharge on cars: to register one car it cost $5K and if you keep the US registration the car has to be removed for the country a couple of times a year for three months each time...

Florida is okay, the west coast is best (Venice is great) but the surfing is awful. The east coast cities like Daytona or the ones south of Kennedy are good and still reasonably affordable. Miami is insane. And Key West is off the charts. Jacksonville (Atlantic Beach) is okay, but is a Navy town and there's plenty of Crime. St Augustine is a little touristry.

PR is good. Old San Juan is beautiful.

California is our choice (my wife has lived in the LA area and in SF) we'd like to move to San Diego, LA coastal, or Santa Cruz. It's likely to be LA coastal.

Costs is relative, California like Boston is expensive, but in check to salaries offered.

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

Venice is a little on the pricey side. We could live in Clearwater and slum it and it'd be okay. Jacksonville is essentially Georgia. I don't like Georgia. I'd rather be on the west coast than the east. We've vacationed in Naples - it was pretty nice, but obviously made for rich old folk.

Pretty sure we can't take the dogs to PR.....

I love Santa Cruz - I can imagine Charlie getting into tussles with the sea lions (and losing because he'd be crushed to death). Haven't been to San Diego, but my dad says it's the best city ever. Haven't been to LA either.

And all this, just to keep my nips intact.

[mr-orgash.livejournal.com]

well, it's important to keep those nips intact--y'know they gotta be kept in good shape for milking and playing and...Oh, god, that was crude, wasn't it?



Anyway, I lived in Venice< FLA for a while and loved it--you gotta get to the crab races down on the pier...Arrrrrrrgh Clearwater? All of Pinalles county is the same pit. It's hell when the snow birds come back to roast. And it's true the west coast is way better (at least to live) than the east, you could always drift down to those towns between venice and naples--it's growth central now.

Yeah, San Diego is a great city, little pricey--but what isn't in California? We're thinking it's going to be Oceanside (SD), Huntington Beach (Orange County) -- they have a great dog beach, LA (someqwhere near the beach) or Santa Cruz -- if you don't mind living in a moble home you can find a place clost to the Pacific for about half or less of what it would cost to live in a regular house...

I'd love to live in Santa Cruz, but it's more likely to be Oceanside or Huntington Beach. Priced some houses there and it's still doable.

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

I'd live on Sanibel if I had a choice - snow birds or not.

I wouldn't mind living in a trailer at all....

[mr-orgash.livejournal.com]

I was surprised at how nice some of the trailers are--heck, you there are affordable houses just outside and to the south of San Francisco--which surprised me -- Daly City is one.

In the end we'll either pick Oceanside, HB, or Santa Cruz -- I gotta get back to the water before I forget how to live.

[cottonmanifesto.livejournal.com]

They can be really nice.

I don't think I could live in Daly City.

I hear you about the water....no idea how the landlubbers do it. When we lived in Indiana (when I was in jr. high), we were always at the nearby lake - not really an ocean substitute, but there were geodes to smash!

[mr-orgash.livejournal.com]

Awwwwwwww what's wrong with Daly City, close to San Francisco, affordable...so what it sits directly on the fault line?

I'm still trying to figure out how I got roped into moving away from the Ocean--Oh well, we bought a house and now have to wait two more years before we sell and move West.

I can't wait, hopefully it'll go fast.

[rwblackbird.livejournal.com]

I have a bird question perhaps you can answer.

While in Australia I noticed that the house sparrows had an unusual feeding habit. They made meals of squashed insects on the front of cars.

When a bus or truck came to a stop at a traffic light, from one to four of the sparrows would land on the windshield wipers and eat as much as they could before the bus started moving again.

In parking lots sparrows would be seen hopping onto the grills at the front of parked cars. They’d jump from car to car.

I haven’t noticed this behavior here in Ontario.

I guess that it is because of our winters. The birds may learn this skill, only to forget it by the time the next summer comes.

Or perhaps being separated from other populations of house sparrows had something to do with it.
Is this a unique trait to the Australian sparrows or do birds in Florida or Africa do the same thing?

Any thoughts?

Thanks.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

Wow! Pretty fascinating. Read on: The following is a letter I received from cartoonist Andy Singer(http://www.andysinger.com/), and I printed it in the fourth issue of my magazine The Urban Pantheist.

My most wild urban wildlife sighting occurred on my honeymoon, in the summer of 1997, in the parking lot of a food coop in Ithaca, New York. My spouse Cara had hone in to buy something and I sat outside and waited for 15-20 minutes. Whenever a large vehicle would pull into the lot (like an S.U.V. or pick-up truck) and the owner would exit the vehicle and go into the store, a crew of sparrows would swoop down and pick (I assume) freshly killed bugs off the radiator grill. I watched them do this on several vehicles! They had figured out that the big grates of incoming cars would have fresh bugs...and they had figured out that they had to wait for the owners to exit the vehicle before swooping in!! What an incredible adaptation! So much for the idea of "bird brains."

I have never seen this behavior, but it's exiting to get two anecdotal reports of it, from two different continents!

[rwblackbird.livejournal.com]

Wow.

I have a natralist club meeting on the 8th with a speaker discussing the importance of the red-shouldered hawks. I'll ask some of the PhDs about it.

I just asked you a question regarding The Urban Pantheist in my lj. I love coinsidences.