By Bernard BrownDawn over the Delaware River painted clouds rose and orange in the frigid morning air as three participants in the Philadelphia Mid-Winter Bird Census stepped out of a hatchback.Keith Russell, Shawn Towey and Patrick McGill stood at the base of the driveway for Pulaski Park in North Philadelphia, binoculars in hand, and confronted
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Drive from New York to Washington, D.C., and it might be hard to imagine that there was once anything there other than cities and suburbs. Today a vast landscape of brick and asphalt, concrete and lawn stretches up along the I-95 corridor, broken only occasionally by marsh, farmland or forest. You might wonder what grew
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In 1970, the City of Philadelphia closed off the East Park Reservoir at the edge of the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood. A gate blocked the ramp up from Fairmount Park. “I grew up in Strawberry Mansion, and the reservoir was used by the community as a recreational space,” explains Tonnetta Graham, president of the Strawberry Mansion Community
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On July 16, a female ruby-throated hummingbird drank from a coral honeysuckle flower at the edge of Tacony Creek Park. We know this because an iNaturalist user with the handle “digitalmirage” took a picture of the bird in the moment before it hummed away. “Recently I’ve been obsessed with hummingbirds,” explains Savannah McHale (a.k.a. digitalmirage), who
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Abrood of fledgling kestrels—America’s smallest falcons that are adorable even as adults—peer through the front of their cage, which sits at the top of shelves filled with animals on the mend. “These are ones we raised from fallen nestlings,” explains Michele Wellard, assistant director of the Philadelphia Metro Wildlife Center. Wellard is careful to make
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Someday the row of young elm trees will transform this sunbaked stretch of Delaware Avenue, but first they have to survive the next couple years. To the west is the Northeast Water Pollution Control Plant. To the east is a Sanitation Convenience Center (where you can drop off hard-to-dispose-of items like tires and mattresses) and
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An entomological research project might bring to mind expeditions through far-away jungles or at least meadows out in the countryside. It probably doesn’t conjure up an Old City chocolate factory rooftop. But to reach this field site we walked into Shane Confectionery. From there we hiked up the stairs through one of the most delicious-smelling
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Racks of tanks with plastic tubes feeding in and out stand against the thick stone walls of the Fairmount Water Works. Together with the microscopes and other lab equipment, it looks like a mad scientist’s underground workshop—that is, until you start reading the cheerful interpretive panels about freshwater mussel restoration. “We’re demonstrating why we care about
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"Mom,” a red-tailed hawk and Philadelphia’s most-watched bird, napped in a small London plane tree next to Sister Cities Park on a gray winter morning. On the sidewalk below, I joined Christian Hunold, associate professor of political science at Drexel University and a nature photographer. We suspected Mom had already filled her crop with rat
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Check any biology textbook for an example of evolution through natural selection, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to read about the finches of the Galapagos Islands. Some have smaller beaks ideal for eating insects. Others have sturdier beaks that crack seeds. As Charles Darwin realized when he visited the Galapagos, all are descended from colonists
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