Tuesday, February 24, 2009

My Friends Brian, Bob and Debra

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Today I added a link to my favorites. It is to Debra Allen's Bird Photography Site. Bob De Candido and Debra are well known birders in Central Park, NYC. I met them in 1997 when I was up on a inner city parish mission in Bushwick-Brooklyn and East Harlem. It was September. I had discovered a nice old set of binoculars and wandered over to Central Park where I discovered the "Hawk Watchers" (..and "Counters"..) On the top level of Belvedere Castle (which is right below the park's Great Lawn and Turtle Pond, and right beside the Delacourt Theatre Bob, Debra, my friend Brian and many others like Richard, Eva, Lloyd,.... watched the huge Fall Migration of Raptors. I was "hooked on hawks", and I was making some nice new friends like Bob, Debra and Brian who has also come to see our Esopus lands here at The Mount. Bob and Debra are also naturalists. Debra is a wonderful nature photographer as you will see when you visit her website. Both of them have spent time in Central America, in Thailand and in places like Pennsyalvania taking part in various studies of hawks, nesting habits and the like. Bob will just "love" my new gmail address. Because it has the name of a raptor that he and Debra are presently studying in New York City--- the American Kestrel or "sparrow hawk" as they are also known. When I lived in the South Bronx I discovered one of their nests and Bob and Debra came to photograph it. I never told them this. But I once wrote a story about Kenny and Katherine, two inner city kestrels that "watched people"....for instance....people like ME who were watching them.

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