An Albino Gray Squirrel in Prospect Park

Photo taken just north of the Picnic House, September 13, 2010

Parrots On My Street

One morning last week, when it was "ridiculously cold" (in the words of WQXR's Jeff Spurgeon) I noticed a pair of Monk Parrots in the tree outside our building on Seeley Street.

These are two of Brooklyn's famous feral parrots. They're also known as "Quaker Parrots."

Well, at last they've arrived on my street. I've seen them in Greenwood Cemetery, of course, and at Brooklyn College, and at City Island, and last year near the Fort Hamilton F stop, but this was the first time I saw them on Seeley Street. I'm assuming they're expanding their territory.

They are an invasive species. But I love them. Their energy, pluck, and intelligence. Tropical birds who manage to survive and even flourish in this foreign environment. And it was so flippin' cold outside!

They're quintessential New Yorkers. Immigrants making it. They belong in Brooklyn, don't they? I guess they have as much right to be here as any of us do.

Update on the Elm Tree

I wrote too fast. "It ain't over till it's over."

The elm tree is still up. They didn't take it down; they removed just a few large limbs.

But it can't be healthy. I don't know if it's completely dead, but it hasn't budded like it should by this time of year. The other elms on Third Street are fully fledged with leaves. On this one the only buds I can see are way high up, but they look like winter buds.

I will keep you posted. In honor of the tree.

Sermon at a Requiem for an Elm Tree

This is a requiem for an elm tree in Park Slope.

It was such a grand tree, one of two great elm trees on Third Street. This is the one near Prospect Park West. I think the house behind contains a couple famous writers, but of the history of love I am an amateur. Ha.

I noticed last August how early it had lost its leaves. A neighbor said it did that every year, but I only half believed him, and I worried about the tree. Now I guess we know that it had been dying for a while.

This spring it barely budded at all. And so they came to take it down. Today, Thursday.

The tree surgeon was up in his bucket when I got there, but he asked me not to take his picture. As they lowered him I thought of a preacher in an old high pulpit, not least because of how loudly and confidently he was declaiming to all the people standing round, both workers and watchers. He announced that the tree had not died from Dutch elm disease. He said it died from what "someday will happen to me, and to you, and to you, and to you, and to every other living thing: old age." He knows a lot more about trees then I do, but I don't believe it died from old age. I wonder how much of what I say my parishioners do not believe?

Thank you tree, for the wonderful beauty you gave us while you lived. Thank you God for this tree. The birds thank you, and so do the bugs.

My older brother and I became tree lovers early on. As kids we spent our time in trees, and because we had the biggest backyard in our section of Bedford-Stuyvesant (we lived in a parsonage) all our friends and playmates were in our trees as well.

We were pre-teens when we first read The Lord of the Rings, and Tolkien only quickened and increased our love of trees. (One of the awful things about those movies is how little comes through of Tolkien's love of trees and flowers and birds and food. And language and poetry.) We feel like trees have personalities. There are some trees in Brooklyn I think of as my friends.

My brother especially loved elm trees. We grieved that so many had died of Dutch Elm Disease. (It's originally from Asia, but it got its name from its earlier victims in the Netherlands.) Right in the middle of downtown Sayville, Long Island, there was a majestic elm that must have been resistant, and its seedlings were growing in all the alleys and behind the stores. We transplanted two of them in our yard. They grew wonderfully. After we moved away from there, one of them was cut down, but the other one still thrives, and you can see it on Google Earth.

This elm on Third Street was five stories tall. Its cloven trunk was wonderfully vertical, in the manner of a deep forest tree. Urban elms more typically have great spreading limbs, torquing and twisting like great dancers in their places.

Dona eis requiem.

Et lux perpetua luceat eis.

Grackles

The grackles are back in the Park. They're not as popular as robins, of course, nor as tuneful. They're blackbirds, after all, from which we stand off a bit.

I remember, from my childhood, listening to the radio at the breakfast table on weekday mornings, how John Gambling and Peter Roberts used to joke about grackles. John Gambling was the host of Rambling with Gambling on WOR. (My mother never missed.) Peter Roberts was his newcaster on the half-hour, and they had this thing called the "John Gambling Research Foundation." Gambling was the straight man, and Roberts the cut-up.

Why they got such a kick out of grackles, I don't know, and just what they said about them, I can't remember. But what I think they must have noticed is that grackles (being blackbirds) are smart and audacious, and they have attitude.

Birds and Planets

My morning prayer window looks out over Prospect Park Southwest.

Friday morning I heard my first robin of 2008, cheerfully chirping its morning song. Today I heard a lot of them as I walked through the Park, but they haven't started grazing yet.

Today as I walked down Second Street, from the Park to Eighth Ave, the stoops were all green! Brownstone and limestone with green highlights. Still in winger! From the damp? The warmth?

I've been watching a planet in the pre-dawn sky, over Ditmas Park :). I can't tell if it's Jupiter or Mercury. It's low enough to be seen between the branches of the taller trees. It's my current morning star.

Wie schoen leuchtet der Morgenstern.

The Ailanthus and The Ginko

Outside my window, across the street, next to the fence of Prospect Park, is a ginko tree. It shades the bench where Melody and I sometimes sit.

Last Wednesday, it still had all its leaves, though most of them had turned. We went to Connecticut for Thanksgiving. When we got back on Friday all its leaves were down. Suddenly, like that.

And there was a beautiful carpet of yellow gold, with touches of green, around our bench. The sidewalk was covered, and the carpet was clean and fresh. In a day or two its lustre would be gone.

The ailanthus is on our side of the street, right against our building. It seems to have dropped its leaves just as suddenly. But they were scattered, and on the street. And it dropped its stems as well, the long leaf stems on which its leaflets grow, and they now litter the corner like straw.

I do not love thee, ailanthus, as I love the ginko. You have come here from China too, but you are lower class, and you have no lovely bark, and your branches break, and people call you messy.

How they can call you "Tree of Heaven" I don't know, unless it is the love of God in Heaven that loves you, and loves you no less than the ginko. But I am not God. My heart is so much smaller with less room for love.

Yet I have accepted you, finally, next to my window. At first I was consumed with wishing you were a maple or an oak, but you are what you are, and I submit to God's love of you.

But ginko, thank you for the carpet that showed us what Eden was like in its first autumn.

The Parrots of Brooklyn

I knew about the colony of feral parrots in the gothic gateway of Green-Wood Cemetery. I knew about the feral parrots at Brooklyn College; you can see their nests on the light standards. Last spring I saw the parrots at the south end of City Island.

But now I've seen the parrots in my own neighborhood, in Windsor Terrace. Twice.

Saturday, as I walked to the Kensington Post Office on McDonald Avenue, I saw three of them in the oak trees next to the Greenwood Ave pedestrian bridge over the Prospect Expressway.

Of course, first I heard them. I wan't out bird-watching, my thoughts were on something else. But their noise is unmistakable. When you hear them, you look for them.

This morning, as I waited for the B67 bus at the corner of McDonald and Terrace, a whole flock of them flew over me, flying south out of the cemetery into our neighborhood.

On Saturday I had thought we might have our own little colony in our neighborhood, but from what I saw this morning I'm guessing that the Gatehouse parrots are wide-ranging.

I love them, I think they are so cool. Sure, I know they are not native, they're invaders, but so are my people, we invaded from the Netherlands, so how can I judge them?

If you want to read about them, go to http://www.brooklynparrots.com/

With Apologies to Frost

Nature’s last green is brown,
Her tints are going down
To blend in with the earth
From which we rise in birth.

Prospect Park is finally changing color now, though the temperature is still too warm. Most of the trees just go to brown, while a few are beginning to show off their yellows, golds, and reds.

Not the white pines on Lookout Hill, above the Nethermead, the white pines that I love. Their needles are even greener than a month ago. They have groomed themselves for winter. It is not so that they do not loose their leaves like other trees. They do.

In September we went to our cabin in Ontario, and my wife Melody said, "Look, the white pines are turning brown." And they were. Their branches were all dead brown needles. She worried for our trees, but she needn’t have. Those brown quintuplet clusters hid the tiny new growth needles behind them.

When I went back in October, the ground was thick with needles, and the white pines were bright and fresh and green. For white pines, Easter should happen in October. Oaks and maples celebrate Passover as the New Year, but conifers keep true to Rosh Hashanah.

White pines like the winter sun. And so in wintertime, when I walk from my apartment to the church, I take the long way, up and over Lookout Hill, so that I can say hello to the white pines, especially when there is snow on the ground.

I haven’t started that yet. And Sunday I was running late, so I took the Center Drive. And as I walked past the Friends Cemetery I saw what I had seen before, that most of the gravestones were in shadow from the trees, but some of the stones were brightly lit in the low rays of the autumn sun.

What’s better for gravestones — sunlight or shadow? I mean, what hastens their decay, the algae that grow in shade, or the heating and cooling of solar energy? Those stones that are brightly lit, do they mark the graves of specially righteous Quakers, whose spirits leave an energy behind to greet the sun, or of specially sinful Quakers, unhappy ones, whose souls are not at rest, and cannot abide the sweet decay of shadow and shade? Is there anyone who can come back from the dead to tell me?

Time is linear for Quakers, and for the rest of us Christians. What has been has been, there is no return, and we are praying for the future, which is a fulfillment of the past, but also therefore essentially different from the past. That's a fundamental belief of Jews and Christians and Muslims.

But trees are Taoists or Buddhists, I think. Trees believe that time is circular, and that everything will come around again. I have no desire to convert the trees to Christianity. Certainly not the white pines. They have no need of redemption.

The Turtles Are Still Singing

The grackles, like Presbyterians, are fly-fishing. Well, that’s not true. They’re eating the flies, not tying them. My cottage is on a rocky shore, and this morning there is a hatch of damselflies. They appear on the surface like sudden memories. If they can keep still, they have a chance. If they flutter too much, the fish are watching, and suddenly it’s over. Some of them get off the water and make it to shore. But the grackles have more experience than damselflies. One has just landed in the grass. A grackle watched it, and leisurely goes over to get it.

On my cottage windows are the proof that some of them survive. I am not up on what they will do now — how they mate, how long they live. They sit on my windows like sages. They take it all in, this exposure to the air and sun, and they try to make sense of the world. They have faint intimations of prior incarnations as larvae under the rocks. They think how beautiful is life, and how short. They wonder at the meaning of it all. One day is a thousand to a damselfly.

Meanwhile the turtles have taken their stations just offshore. For hours they tread water and gaze up at my property. I suppose it has do with the eggs they’ve laid in the road behind my kitchen. Are they calling to their children, telepathically? Singing an ancient song of where the water is? I heard the turtles singing each to each. Is it a song of comfort and grief? At night the raccoons come and dig up the eggs. The raccoons are nothing if not thorough. I am amazed we still have turtles. Yet saints their watch are keeping, their cry goes up, "How long?"

What would turtles tell the damselflies? The lives of turtles are as long as damselflies’ are short. Flight in any form they do not understand. But for all their armor and protection their reproduction is tragically vulnerable. Turtles are conservative, they have been doing it this way since the Triassic, before there were raccoons, and mammalian innovations will not make them change. How stubborn they are. Or maybe how little they expect from life, and how content.

The fortunes of damselflies and turtles are opposite. The damselflies’ lives are mostly spent as nymphs, in relative safety under the rocks beneath the lake, while their adult lives are nasty, cold, brutish, and short. The turtles live long as adults, sort of carrying their rocks on their backs, and their vulnerability is in their youth. Maybe that’s why they are so conservative. They are convinced that youth is dangerous.

The damselflies on my windows never learn to sing but they can understand the turtles’ songs, if not the words, then at least the tunes. We are born to trouble, as bugs fly upward. Life is fragile, no matter how hard you are or how long you live. We have our different strategies for managing risk, but we cannot escape danger, we can only shift it around. We bear up. The turtles’ favorite book in the Bible is Ecclesiastes. All the damselflies know is the Jesus Prayer.

Sidewalk Trees of Park Slope

My favorites are the great Red Oak on President Street, down by the Berkeley Carroll pool, and the American Elms on Third Street. There's one across the street from my friend Jerry's house, just up from Seventh Avenue. There's another great one almost at PPW, on the inside of the sidewalk. My wife Melody calls it an eight-story elm.

Third Street is especially wonderful for sidewalk trees.

I grew up in a part of Brooklyn that had no sidewalk trees. Herkimer Street, the eastern end of Bedford-Stuyvesant. Our streets were hot, hot, hot in the summer. Of course we didn't care, we were too busy running around and having fun. I can remember the pavement kind of soft beneath our Skelly game. The only coolness we got was from opening the hydrants, till the cops came around.

But my dad was a preacher, so we had a parsonage and the only big yard on the street, and inside our spiked iron fence we had apple trees in the back and a maple tree on the side. The apple trees were thick with branches and great for just sitting in (you could even read the Hardy Boys up there). And our friends used to gather in our yard, mostly for the trees.

The maple tree was the only big tree on our block. It reached out over the sidewalk and part of Dewey Place. It had a long branch just high enough that you could climb up our fence and swing up to it and then, if you had guts, jump down to the ground. (I think I was nine before I finally jumped.) We found scraps of wood and old nails and pounded ladders up the trunk and built a fort, of course.

It was a Norway Maple. Now it's considered a weed tree, but that tree inspired my love of trees. I think it's why as a child I liked maples best, thought now it's white pines that I love.

Compared to the R.O.B. (the rest of Brooklyn) we have so many sidewalk trees in Park Slope and Windsor Terrace. We're spoiled. What they add to the quality of life is incalculable.

I never see any kids climbing these trees. Insurance? Health? Safety? I never see kids building ladders up their trunks. Maybe it's illegal now. Maybe they do it in their backyards. Of course, the trunks of those sidewalk elms and oaks are lofty and daunting; I'd have been afraid of them myself. But I think the sycamores would have drawn our crowd of kids to enter them.

Blecchh. Too much nostalgia here. There's a big ailanthus right outside my window as I write. It judges me. I have always hated them. (In Bed-Stuy dialect we called them "shumac".) Its species did not ask to be imported to America, but once it was brought here, its genes decided to flourish. Its genes are generous to a fault, and tolerant, and tough. They judge me. I repent beneath its coolness, greenth, and shade.

I wonder how far up it I could get.

"Those Trees Were My Friends"

I forget who said it, an ent or an elf, but I think it was somewhere in the Lord of the Rings or the Silmarillion. It was after the destruction of many trees by orcs.

That thought came to me last Friday as I was hiking with my wife Melody through some woods upstate, woods that once knew very well. It was grievous to me, because many trees were dead that once had been my friends. A whole long hillside of hemlocks was dead. It was ghastly and ghostly.

Between the trunks a strange and unhappy sunlight shone down. The death was so recent that there was no new growth yet. The ground was a mess of broken hemlock branches and leaves from nearby oaks and birches and beeches. The life had been sucked out of the place.

I had known specific trees from when I used to take care of the trail that we were hiking. There was one against a wall of rock that I used to like, and there was a particular grove in which I used to sit. There was the great big hemlock over that bend in the trail below the ridge, and the other one that stood senty at a little clearing. They all were dead.

They were all killed by the hemlock blight. It has been coming north for years. I learned of it back in 1995 when I was leading a backpacking group along the Appalachian Trail. We were taking a rest in a hemlock grove and the through-hiker who was with us told me about it. I had hoped it wouldn't come this far north, or that we had more time. Nope.

The trail I used to take care of is in the Wawayanda Hills upstate. Not very far upstate, just across the border from New Jersey, near Warwick, New York. The Reformed Church has a conference center there, at the northern tip of many square miles of forest in Passaic and Bergen counties. I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of hemlocks have died this last decade?

Will the hemlocks come back? Will resistant ones survive and breed and spread their young? The chestnuts have never come back from the chestnut blight. A very few elms have survived Dutch Elm Disease. These tend to be isolated ones, like a huge one I know if hidden inside a Park Slope block, or the great one that used to live at the main downtown intersection of Sayville, Long Island. My brother and I found its saplings in the alley behind the stores, so we transplanted them in our yard, and one of them still thrives; you can see it on Google Earth. Those trees were our friends.

When my brother Henk and I were kids in Bedford-Stuyvesant we spent a good deal of our time in trees: the Norway Maple on the side of the house and apple trees in back. And it wasn't just us. Our whole gang of kids was always up in trees.

Yep. I pray for the elms and the hemlocks. Right now the oaks and maples don't seem to need our intercessory prayers. So far nothing seems to be killing white pines, apart from human beings. I have some particular white pine friends in Brooklyn, Hoboken, and Ontario. But I tell you, if something were ever to happen to the white pines, I don't know if I could take it.

White Pines

I walk from my apartment to the church through Prospect Park. Occasionally, if I have enough time, I cross over Lookout Hill, and especially if it's a windy day. There are white pines up there, and the sound of the wind through white pines is just about my favorite sound in all of God's creation. It always lifts my spirit, but it also stirs my sehnsucht, my longing.

Bruce Caton, in his marvelous and beautifully written history of Michigan, reports that there used to be magnificent stands of white pines all through the Lower Peninsula. These were lumbered early on. He reports that the early lumbermen could find the largest ones simply by listening for their distinctive sound.

I was unaware of white pines till I lived a while in Michigan, and it was there I came to love them. Sixteen years ago I planted one in Hoboken, and it is doing very well. (You can see it on Google Earth, in the backyard of 606 Garden Street, just to the left of the magnolia.)

Now I look for them in Brooklyn. You can see some from the D train, off New Utrecht Avenue.

What gave me special joy last week was to see a young one, a volunteer sapling, growing on Lookout Hill. I praise God for such things.

The Unloved Parks of Queens

I know I'm an odd guy and I do odd things. One of the odd things I do is take long walks on my day off. Yesterday I took a very long walk---a hike, in fact---through some parks in Queens.

What, are you nuts?

Two years ago I did Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx. It's the city's largest park. I had never been there before. (I went looking for the owls.) Last year I did Forest Park, on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. It's a park I've known since my childhood. Yesterday I did a string of parks: from Flushing Meadow Corona Park to the Kissena Corridor to Cunningham Park. I started at Shea Stadium and ended up on Hillside Ave.

I do these walks in early spring because it's warm but not too warm, and the ground is not too soggy, and the birds are back but the bugs aren't. On a day like yesterday I could almost watch the buds and leaves unfold. The trees were greener at the end of the hike than they were when I set out.

This was the first time I had been in Flushing Meadows since the 1963 World's Fair. I was ten at the time. The park is now a broad expanse of grass and walkways and lines of trees. It's not unpleasant, though it lacks imagination and beauty.

I walked East under the VanWyck Expressway, until I reached the Queens Botanical Gardens. Then I entered the very strange Kissena Corrider. This is a long and narrow stretch of, well, parkland that crosses the broad middle of Queens. It is divided into sections by north-south avenues. Some sections are landscaped and some have ballfields and playgrounds. Some sections are just open fields and scrub woods. These are untended, not wild, and they feel like no-man's-land.

The amount of trash and junk in these sections is distressing. You see evidence of illegal dumping and piles of construction debris. There's lots of erosion and the trails show motorbike tracks. I saw evidence of casual sex in certain places. Yuk.

And yet the birds don't seem to care. There were lots of them. I saw some flickers in one section, and a red-tailed hawk soaring. And if I were a kid I wouldn't care. Not very much.

The Corridor narrows between pristine neighborhoods, and it crosses the Long Island Expressway with a pedestrian and cycling bridge. It runs tightly between a couple schools, which use it for recreation, and it leads you to Cunningham Park.

This park is chopped up by avenues and expressways. (Robert Moses never saw a park he didn't put a highway through.) The northern section is just rough woods, full of junk and much abused and eroded by many paths and tire tracks. The middle section is mostly ballfields.

The southern section is remarkable. It's pristine and almost wild. There is no trash at all, and just two trails. There are hidden ponds and a wealth of birds and great stands of magnificent trees, red oaks and hickories and tulip trees. Such red oaks, lofty and vigorous even in their stillness. You'd think you were in the country, if not for the din of traffic on the Clearview Expressway and the Grand Central Parkway and Francis Lewis Boulevard and Union Turnpike. These very highways have served as moats to protect this hidden forest.

Then you find your way out across a highway ramp, and exit the park and head down to Hillside Ave and the bus and the subway.

These parks do not feel loved to me. Not like Central Park and Prospect Park are loved. It's not just that they are neglected, or that there is no Cunningham Park Alliance or Flushing Park Fellowship or Kissena Kindred. It's more than that. These parks don't seem to mean as much to the denizens of Queens.

Is it because Queens is less dense, and less pedestrian? That its people spend more time in the car, and their connection to the landscape is less about public space and more about private driveway and yard?

Queens people identify with their own particular town or village or neighborhood that with their borough? The Lutheran School my brother and I went to in our childhood was in Queens, but its address was always given as "Glendale, Long Island, New York." That lack of borough-identity might decrease the affection for their borough's central parks.

And Queens is also the most ethnically diverse county in the U.S.A. That too suggests less borough identity, and less identification with the landscape. The people of Queens have just not been here long enough to love the land they live on.

I loved Forest Park as a child. It was adjacent to the Lutheran School. We lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant, and some years (when we didn't take the city bus) we had to wait for my mom and dad drive out to pick us up, and then we played in Forest Park. We liked them coming late. We played in the narrow woods between the houses and the Interboro (now Jackie Robinson) Parkway. It was our own favorite jungle.

I didn't know Prospect Park well enough to love it. We went fishing there, and ice-skating, but we didn't play there with our friends. But now I do love it. As do many other Brooklynites. And yes, it has its share of trash and erosion, and in many spots it's torn and frayed, but in this case it's because it's loved, like the Velveteen Rabbit.

I saw few other people walking in Flushing Meadow and Kissena Park, and I saw no one else in Cunningham Park. That's never so in Prospect Park.

Human beings were designed by God to love the world, the earth, the landscape. It's what we're supposed to do. Even when we use it, and cultivate and build on it, we are to love it. Neglect can be as unloving as abuse is.

The Biblical story begins in a garden and ends in a city. It goes from Eden to the New Jerusalem. That city contains a "paradise," which is a royal garden. In the middle of Queens is paradise. I hope that the immigrants who put down roots will also come to love the land they are planted on, and the open corridor between their neighborhoods.