Pigs and such

Two pot-bellied pigs, wearing dog-coats, were walking behind a fellow yesterday in Dumbo. The pigs were leashed, but the leashes were flung across their backs, and the good man said they didn’t need them. For pigs are smarter than dogs, and even a good number of people, too. Our ham and Brie sandwich from Almondine, which we were eating at the time, lost some of its savor, although pigs, as the mafia well knows, will return the favor and eat us.

A ring-billed gull on the fence at Empire-Fulton Ferry gave us the eye from just a few feet away, and a male and female gadwell were spotted in the little bay. Rafts of ice bobbed about here and there.

By the time we got up to the Promenade it was snowing in earnest, but that didn’t prevent us from hawk-eying a male kestrel on the Montague lamp-post. Something I didn’t notice last week is that the to of the post is nicely splattered with long lines of white-wash, which tells us that the post is a regular perch. Raptors often excrete just before flying. The tiercel (a male falcon is a tiercel, a female falcon is a… falcon) zoomed about to land on the air-intake and the fence cutting off the street from the waterfront, and returned to the lamp perch several times. We walked down there and got a really nice look before it jetted up to the top of the chimney at a building at the end of Grace Court. If “kestrel in the snow” isn’t the beginning of a haiku, then I wasn’t born in Japan.

The real inaugural bee ball is at the AMNH tonight.