Le Globale Warming est arrivé...

Mayday, Mayday, on May 1st, at Lowe's. This morning your Red Hook neighborhood home improvement superstore was laying out the largest stock of airconditioners I've ever seen. An unpleasant barometer of the warming times to come. I wanted to yell "too soon, too soon!"

Sell your waterfront property dept. UPDATED

According to twitter stream #cop15, we've gone from Copenhagen to Hopenhagen to Nopenhagen...

Update: as the comments point out, there's also Floppenhagen. And I've reached a grumpy new stage, Mopenhagen.

Alabalmy

After enjoying the overwhelming hospitality of Atlanta for a long weekend of art openings and book reading, Laura and I hit the road. We were looking forward to a slow and relaxed three days of tropical camping along the sultry gulf shores, en route to New Orleans. Back-roading it, we headed for the Eufaula National Wildlife Refuge, on Alabama's easternmost edge. At a viewing platform overlooking distant flooded fields dotted with gabbling waterfowl, we gobbled sandwiches under the grey and wintry luncheon sky, noting the unseasonable chill in the air. Not to fear, we thought; there will be many more miles of driving south and sunward, before we pitch our tent in the balmy Caribbean breezes.

At Opp, just above the Florida panhandle, we sought out the Frank Jackson State Park campground. Signs warned of alligators, but not of the weather. After choosing a campsite, we drove back into town. Opp seems to have once stood for "opportunity," but perhaps the town lost the rest of its letters when it was discovered that, to be honest, there were few opportunities to be had there. The only supermarket was a squalid, discount affair clogged with cut rate corn syrup and nonperishable items made from refined flour. It was as dismal a shopping experience as capitalism has to offer. Settling for couple of packages of ramen, we drove back to Frank Jackson, discovering that with nightfall, and in our brief absence, the wind had begun to blow, hard, directly off of the lake and towards our campsite. The advertised alligators all seemed to be safely hibernating. Worse, had the wind not been churning the surface of the water into a series of choppy, standing waves, it was cold enough outside that the lake would certainly have frozen.

Much colder than it looks

Pulling on the skimpy windbreaker I had packed "just in case," I set to getting the tent up. Soon my fingers were as frigid and chilly as the cold aluminum tent poles. The wind was so violent that the stove would not even light, until Laura, freshly returned from a visit to the toilet block--"wonderfully heated, unlimited hot water, you really ought to try it sometime"--suggested putting it deep under the camper top of the pickup. Stomping our feet, we took our mugs of instant noodles back into the cab, where we had been sitting all day, driving and "looking forward to parking this thing and getting out into nature."

Outside, the wind was whipping the rainfly of the tent, and I watched it anxiously from inside the car, fearful that the whole mess might blow away. I had faith however, in my staking skills, learned in Antarctica while preparing to head out to camp at Mt. Boreas. After checking the stakes I gloated to Laura that the tent was as safe as a house. All plans for an evening stroll were abandoned, and with the temperatures in the twenties, and the wind chill doubtless far lower, we bundled into the tent and battened down the zippers.

Dawn arrived, crisp and calm and frigid. "I'll make tea, while you take a hot shower," I announced, magnanimously. I put water on to boil and began stuffing the sleeping bags in their stuff sacks and taking apart the tent. My toes are chilly, I thought. Perhaps I'll start the car, let it warm up for our departure. Maybe I'll just sit in it, for a moment.

Ice hockey, anyone?

When Laura returned to the half-dismantled tent she found me sitting in the truck clutching a cup of jasmine tea, the heater blasting. "What's all this nonsense about Antarctica you are always spouting?" She asked, when I rolled the window open a tiny crack. "You're nothing but a big wimp."

What are you doing here?

Looking off the back deck a couple of weeks ago, which is to say smack dab in the middle of January, I was shocked to spot cavorting in the neighbor's garden a spectacular male Baltimore Oriole. Brilliantly plumaged in orange and black, this bird is an occasional but never common springtime migrant through the grit of Red Hook. It is entirely unexpected in winter. Even the hardiest representatives of its clan should be found passing the season no further north than North Carolina. Global warming? Perhaps.

Unlikely winter visitor; in January it should be far to the south of Baltimore. (I know, my fence needs a little work; luckily spring will soon be upon us)

Then, this week's religious Friday telephone call to the New York Rare Bird alert, 212-979-3070, often transcribed on the web, brought exciting news of a putative first state record for Scott's Oriole, a yellower relative of the Baltimore. This particular individual is so confused we can scarcely blame climate change; it normally resides in the south-western deserts of New Mexico and Arizona. Having arrived somewhat addled in the New York area, its motives unknown, this bird, a first year male, apparently confused Union Square Park with the arid bluffs and canyonlands of its place of birth, taking up residence amongst the starlings, pigeons and restauranteurs.

That thing must be around here somewhere

Once having established that the famous Union Square Greenmarket does indeed operate on Fridays, so that we would be able to purchase organic vegetables and local grassfed beef between bouts of ornithology, therefore metaphorically killing two birds with one stone, we set off for the city in an adrenaline rush. As I've noted before in these pages, it has historically been the kiss of death whenever I go on one of these local rarity hunts, as my presence all but guarantees the permanent disappearance of the sought-after specie. But last August, that curse was lifted.

"What are all you people looking at?" was the most common question innocent passersby asked of the entranced cult of birders

At the southwestern corner of the park, already known, the scuttlebutt had it, as the preferred hangout for the oriole, clumps of binocular-toting birdos stood chatting, but without intensity. There was none of the unified, focussed pointing of high caliber optics that indicates, even from far off, that the bird has been spotted and is under observation. We abandoned this placid scene, delving into the denser foliage at the heart of the urban square, tripping over tourists and pushing old ladies out of the way. Still no bird.

The scene in front of Staples, Union Square, last Friday

We forged on, undeterred by the winos and businessmen braving the cold to slurp lunch-time soup on park benches. There, up ahead, half-way to the greenmarket where the organic turnips were waiting, about even with 16th st., stood another dense knot of birders. This time all had their binoculars clamped to their faces in an almost military synchrony. Necks cocked back as one, the group was staring skyward into a tree, eying a dismal, yellow feathered blob. Scott's Oriole! Or at least so they are saying. Hunched over amongst the backlit twigs at the top of a tall tree, it was impossible to say for sure. It was a yellow and black bird, that was certain.

Dude, I came all the way from Brooklyn, do you mind coming down out of that tree?

No wonder, perhaps, that this alien visitor, adrift in the great city, was almost ignored for more than a month. First seen in early December, it was misidentified for weeks as an Orchard Oriole, a regular summer visitor to the north-east. Although even less likely to be seen in New York in January than my Baltimore, the sighting of a winter Orchard Oriole was not so fabulously thrilling that this bird received sufficient attention for its true identity to be revealed. Perhaps it spent some time hidden in the confines of the elitest, private and key-protected Gramercy Park, just uptown, or perhaps those who visited it were happy to call it an Orchard and move on. In any event it was only last week that expert examination of photographs finally inspired a horde of birding visitors to visit Union Square.

One of the great things about life in New York is that the same guy who will walk by Madonna or George Clooney on the sidewalks of lower Broadway without batting an eye happily leaps into action as a kind of self-anointed tour guide to such obscure events as the appearance of a vagrant Oriole in a city park, marshaling foot traffic and giving the newcomers the latest updates. How else to account for a friendly binocularless man in an enormous orange parka, altogether unfamiliar with the unwritten etiquette of the bird-obsessed, simply swept away in the communal excitement, jumping up and down, gesturing to the crowd that he had found a superior vantage point? And the curious, who perhaps had never shown any interest in a bird before in all their city lives, amazed to see so many freakish and apparently unemployed citizens pointing their expensive optics at a bland dot in a tree, and therefore waiting around, chatting, learning about the weird ways of the bird folk and hoping like the rest of us that the bird would come lower in the trees to offer a view worth telling friends and family about later in the day: the story of meeting the birders incomplete without the punchline of getting a good look at the bird.

March of the zombies? Or the Scott's Oriole (2858), finally on the ground, offering crippling looks?

At last, following, it seemed, a swirl of Starlings, the Oriole took flight in the direction of its beloved southwest. Rushing back towards the intersection of University and 14th St., we arrived at the favored corner in time to find the bird pecking away at some mandarin segments thoughtfully left on the ground in a tiny fenced off corner of the park, just across the street from the Staples superstore. Perhaps not everyone's idea of a wilderness experience, but very satisfying all the same.

Note the dark face with almost black cheeks and the olive-streaked quality to the upper back, both important field marks. This bird was apparently first spotted in early December and was only conclusively identified this week. Superior images are here.

A Monsoon comes to Brooklyn (sell your waterfront property now dept.)

The Pacific navigators of yore leaned out of their proas and observed the angle of the chop of the waves before glancing at the distant horizon to read there a comprehensive meteorological report. Millennia ago, our species could smell as well as many others; alert heads turned at the distant wafted whiff of a predator; our ears pricked up at the scent of potential prey. Today, although in many ways alleged to be more advanced, we have lost those skills. Therefore, I may be wrong when I say that this summer, the sky over Brooklyn has a new and troubling aspect, an ominous look never before seen in these latitudes. There is an inexorable, rolling, bruised eggplant character to clouds that bring waves of rain, falling in sheets before passing quickly on, leaving a churning purple mass to reconstitute itself in the sky. Evening after evening a narrow slit of sulphurous yellow lies to the west, behind the Statue of Liberty, crushed under thick, gray, swirling cotton fit to burst, the sorts of clouds that in all my many travels have always served to announce and reinforce an arrival in the tropics. Here in Brooklyn we have, suddenly, heavy, wet, oppressive skies straight out of the Guatemalan rainy season, weather that one might expect to seeing gathering on the Amazonian horizon or lurking behind an Indonesian island in a Joseph Conrad novel. It is something alien, a Philippine typhoon gathering above New York harbor.

In other news, it is 105 degrees plus in southern Romania, as if it were August in the Sahara.

These things are not normal.