This Sunday, friends of ours from Lindsay’s school took Lindsay for the day. We had 4 hours to ourselves and decided to walk around Prospect Park. We went to the Audubon Center, which somehow I had never visited. The 1905 Beaux Arts building was nearly torn down in the 1960s, but NYC granted it landmark status. The Prospect Park Alliance teamed up with Audubon New York to restore the boathouse and in 2002 it was completed. It’s a really lovely building that houses the nation’s first urban Audubon Center.

They have lots of events, including free birdwatching and nature walks every saturday and sunday. We took a nature walk and saw many of the birds we saw the day before at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. Our guide was funny and nice and really knew his stuff. While we were out on the tour, we ran into a friend on a different tour. Her tour was a 4-hour guide to wild edibles. She’s planning an article on Depression eating. I really want to take the next tour, which will be in Central Park and will be at a time when more plants are out.

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On Saturday we went to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, which is a part of Gateway National Recreation Area to get a nature fix. This national park is lovely and in most areas you have no visual clues you are in or near a huge city. I kind of like the area where city meets nature, so my photos show more of that than the quiet nature. We saw lots of birds that were too far away to take decent photos. Some of what we saw was: downy woodpecker, northern shoveler, american coots, canada geese, snow geese (by the hundreds) great egret, eastern phoebe. There were many other birds that were hiding in the bushes, including many sparrows, which I don’t know how anyone can identify.

I’m not very good at identifying water birds, so we kind of looked over the shoulders of other birders and asked for help. Some were dressed as though they were going on a safari, which was kind of hilarious. Reminded me of the photo nerds I have spent countless hours around.

I really like the quiet color palette of winter.

Hundreds and hundreds of snow geese

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