Dinner With Pale Male, the Red-Tailed Bat

Friday evening, Sept. 2, 5:15 p.m. Pale Male is perched in a tree over Iphigene's Walk in the Ramble. He has been hunting in the area recently (I last saw him here on Aug. 24). Is he aware of the little brown rabbit that someone abandoned in Maintenance Meadow? Is that why he is hunting here?

Pale Male swoops down to the west side of the restroom building and catches a small rat. He takes it back near Iphigene's Walk and eats it swiftly. He sits some more, looking around.

5:35 p.m. Pale Male swoops back to the building and grabs another rat. He subdues it with his talons, and this time flies south with it, then heads east. When next seen, he is hanging upside from a small tree by one talon, batlike, the rat in his beak. Is he in trouble, or a trapeze artist? We held our breaths.

Pale Male, Batbird?

After what seems like forever but is actually about a minute, he lets go of the tree and lands on the ground, repositions the rat in his talons, and flies back to a tree over Maintenance Meadow and has his second course.

Pale Male after the trapeze act.

Once finished, he flies north over the 79th Street transverse and perches in a pine tree, surrounded by soft needles.

I put together a video of the evening dramatics with the famous red-tailed hawk. It's a Bird! It's a Bat! It's Pale Male! is one of my favorites!

I was able to take some nice photos. This was a truly remarkable evening with a truly remarkable bird.

Monarch Metamorphosis, Caterpillar Stage

On August 31, monarch caterpillars were chomping down on the milkweed in the garden east of the model boat pond (Conservatory Pond). These are monarch larvae, in the 5th instar stage, just before they go into the pupa stage and become chrysalises. What these striped critters aspire to is the magnificent monarch butterfly we are blessed with at this time of year.

Monarch butterfly, BEFORE

Monarch butterfly, AFTER

I did a Silly Video to celebrate all that munching, called Monarch Wannabes. I set it to music by Charles Gounod, including the "Funeral March of the Marionette," which is also known as Alfred Hitchcock's theme music. To be a living being that goes through all these stages, to live such a short time, seems amazing — almost Hitchcockian!

Some more photos of the creepy crawlers. So much fun to watch, but they chomp for 3 to 5 days, so are probably building their new homes and hanging out now (apparently, they should be called pupa or chrysalises, not cocoons, because the monarchs don't create silken coverings).

There are a number of sites discussing the life cycle of the monarch butterfly. I like the National Wildlife Federation site, but I had fun looking at other sites.

Two August Evenings With Pale Male, and One With Octavia

The evenings of August 21 and August 24, I had more opportunities to watch Pale Male. On August 28, I had a rarer chance to watch Octavia, Pale Male's mate, for some time before it got dark. Just to let you know, there are no shots of Pale Male or Octavia eating anything. Just quiet times with the two.

Pale Male on a gingko tree, August 24, 2016

Octavia on the Met Museum, August 28, 2016

What a family!

Pale Male on August 21, just south of the Poland Statue. It was a rainy evening.

Pale Male, the evening of August 24, near Maintenance Meadow. In the first photo, you can see a red-tailed helicopter in the background (when I'm looking for hawks and spot something flying in the sky that confuses me, it is a red-tailed whatever!).

Octavia on the Met Museum on August 28, and one shot when she flew over to the playground "island" between the east and west 86th Street transverses. We don't get to see her that often, and rarely see her go to ground. When she flew down to the lawn north of the museum, we hoped to see her catch something. But she didn't catch anything, and was back on the roof before we got shots of her on the ground.