It took my wife Jen about five minutes to spot two rats (I missed the first) running toward an overflowing trash can near the center of Rittenhouse Square. No one else saw them. True, it was dark, but the park was filled with couples chatting on benches, bar-hoppers strolling through, a circle of twentysomethings sitting
MoreYou know Chestnut, the street that runs west to east between Market and Walnut? Have you ever seen a chestnut tree? Locusts, pines, spruces and walnuts are all around, even if you’ve never noticed them. But you’d be hard pressed to find a chestnut tree. They’re almost all dead.
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Who’s got the best mussels in philadelphia? Sure, the Saison Dupont-bathed Ghent bivalves at Monk’s Café are divine. But by far, Philadelphia’s most interesting mussels are out in our rivers, buried in the mud.
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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
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Everyone 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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