After a few days not seeing the female Eastern Screech-Owl due to the snow, she’s back in her current cavity. She came out fairly late. I was able to take some good pictures however due to a street lamp.
She went to a western tree after fly out and then went north across The Pool before going up the eastern side of the Great Hill.
The Coyote was active early Monday evening, coming down to the north fence but retreating before even leaving Hallett. The noise from the skating rink must have been too much for it.
Later in the evening, the Coyote played on the ice. The Coyote made a few passes over the ice and at one point went onto the southern most path of the park. Scared by some people it made a gigantic leap over the fences and shrubs to get back onto the ice.
Here are a few photographs from the evening and a very short slow motion clip. This Coyote is hard to photograph in the dark!
The Central Park Coyote was hard to spot over the last few days. On Friday, we only saw footprints in the fresh snow. On Saturday, I didn’t see it.
On Sunday, I only saw it for only a few minutes. It exited the hole in the northern section of the Hallett Nature Sanctuary fence and headed toward the west around 6:45 p.m. The Coyote got spooked by some people, so it immediately came back to Hallett and then finally left for good about five minutes later.
Lola and Charlotte are the nicknames given two female hawks around Central Park who have been mothers in the past. Both hawks were getting ready for the next nesting season on Sunday
Lola, the lighter of the two hawks, was busy soaring around the Fifth Avenue nest and working on tidying it up. She will most likely lay eggs mid-March.
Charlotte, who nests at 888 Seventh Avenue, was seen eating a pigeon and chasing of a juvenile hawk up at the Sheep Meadow. She generally lays eggs a few weeks after Lola.
Both females have had nesting issues these last few years. May they both have a successful year in 2010.
Rabies continues to spread among the Central Park Raccoon population. 52 raccoons tested positive for rabies city wide in the last two months, with most being in the park. Please use common sense with these raccoons. On Saturday, I had to stop a father from letting his son feed a raccoon and had to warn a photographer to keep his distance from a raccoon out in the daylight.
The Parks Department staff put up warning signs in the Ramble and the North Woods in English at the start of the epidemic. Looking at the distribution map of the last few months, maybe they should consider putting up multilingual warning signs at every park entrance.
The Health Department reminds us that the last New York City rabies case in a human was in the 40s, so there is no need to panic. Both the Bronx and Staten Island have had rabies outbreaks in raccoons in recent years without humans getting infected. That said, the Health Department still recommends taking basic precautions against getting our pets or ourselves infected.
I saw the Coyote for only a few minutes on Thursday evening while the weather switched between snow and rain. The Coyote certainly does not like being near people. If it sees you looking in its direction, it instantly moves away. This bodes well for the Coyote. If it can stay out of people’s way, there should be no need to remove it from the park.
I’m always surprised when people don’t expect there to be nature in New York City. Given the expansion of Coyotes in the eastern United States, it was only a mater of time before we got another one wandering into Central Park.
If I look at my ancestors in America, they started as rural farmers, then moved to towns and then cities. (Ironically my first ancestors, which date back from the 1640s, were from what is now Brooklyn.) The towns protected them from wild animals and as they moved to cities there was this added artificial concept of a “man-made world”, separate from the natural world.
The natural world never really left, but an illusion was created that nature had been tamed, as though somehow animals were as controlled as the city’s landscaped gardens.
When we have a Red-tailed Nest (the Trump Parc nest was only 300 yards from the Coyote), a Wild Turkey or a Great Horned Owl in the city, it makes news. While the wild animals captivate us, what really seems to excite us is the realization that despite our best efforts to create a “man-made world”, we’re still really living in the “natural world”.
