Sunset, life, death

Last night’s sunset, after a day (seems like days!) of rain, was spectacular. As I walked up-Slope, the windows of apartment buildings on Prospect Park West roared with our star's red-shifted light. Except for Richard Meier on the Park, which looked like the dead plastic thing that it is. There’s a month to go before the summer solstice, but the sun is already setting further north than the line of Congress Street.

The starlings and house sparrows dwelling with us under our eaves and inside our cornices are having this year’s crop of downy nestlings. So every year around this time, the ones that don’t make it are found on the sidewalk.

There were Canada geese goslings on the old 9/11 memorial garden underneath the Brooklyn Promenade on Sunday. It’s just a scrubby field now, but with enough grasses and seeds evidently to feed three fuzzy babies. There was a dead turtle in the harbor off Red Hook at the end of Van Brunt St on Saturday. Must have been a sea turtle of some kind; it was dinnerplate-sized, but not accessible for further examination.

We successfully moved the two bee hives on Sunday, for safety (ours, theirs), access, and educational opportunities, but here’s the thing: the foragers who were out of the hive early, before the deeps could be sealed, came back to the old site. Even though the hives are now just a few yards away, the workers are programmed to return to the location of the hive, not the hive itself. So hundreds of them flew confusedly over the old location, a cloud of unknowing, heavy with nectar and pollen. They were not going to make it home, unfortunately.