My wife, Jen, adores Canada geese. She especially loves the fluffy goslings that graze alongside their parents throughout grassy Philadelphia, but she waves to the adults, too. Jen might be the only Philadelphian I’ve met who likes the geese, and, like anyone whose spouse holds a dangerously contrarian position, I am bound to publicly agree
MoreEveryone knows what a sparrow is, right? Those ubiquitous little birds that compete with the pigeons for crumbs in front of park benches across Philadelphia? Well, they are and they aren’t. Most of them, Eurasian house sparrows, don’t belong here. They’re completely different birds in a completely different family than our native sparrows, except that
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In europe, they simply call it the common reed, but over here we can’t dignify the villain with such an innocuous name, especially when its scientific name, Phragmites, sounds so sinister: “frag-MITE-ees,” pronounced with a grimace.
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"You’re too cute to hate,” I told the hockey puck-sized black turtle as it clawed at me to get down and craned its neck to bite my hand. Biting is cute when the critter is round, helpless and has big, black eyes. Unfortunately, cute doesn’t count for much when you’re holding up development. The bog
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I have many photographs of garter snakes attacking. Some are biting my hand. The others are going after the camera, their pink mouths open wide and ready to do battle. I am usually trying for a more peaceful composition, but garter snakes are fighters—they don’t sit there passively while a monster lifts them way off
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I once enjoyed the deer of Woodlands Cemetery. I would jog around a mausoleum and they’d go bounding away. Often they wouldn’t flee, eerily tolerant of the human stumbling (you never feel clumsier than when you’re comparing yourself to deer) only a few yards away. They were a delight to watch, but it couldn’t last.
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The fat raccoon waddled down the sidewalk like he owned it, offering no indication that he viewed the human walking behind him as any threat at all. I followed slowly for a minute, enacting a surprising level of decorum—“After you! No, take your time!” Eventually, it slipped through the short fence around the triangular pocket
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Out for a herping expedition along Cobbs Creek with a group of children from West Philadelphia’s Lea School, I was hoping for snakes. After all, snakes are the most glamorous, gross-out find from a grade-school perspective, and I wanted to look like the expert “snake man” Dr. Vivienne—co-guide and community volunteer—had promised the kids.
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An urban environment is no deterrent to hawk watchingby Bernard Brown, phillyherping.blogspot.comOn this particular morning, the pigeons were smarter than the squirrels. Walking from my office to the ATM, I noticed breadcrumbs strewn across a stretch of sidewalk in Washington Square Park. A pair of young squirrels took turns jumping on each other and tussling
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