Latests posts
Saying goodbye
It has been six months since I had to say goodbye to Bradley. I still feel the pain. I tried to write about him many times, but every time a thought would enter my head, my brain would shut down. It still does. Grief is painful. Bradley was my cat, a black tuxedo I adopted…
Hawks in the Bronx
Couple of years ago, I was walking to work on a sunny morning day. The busy streets of the Bronx filled my ears with the sounds of accelerating cars, rushing pedestrians, and elevated subway passing overhead. Typical morning commute commotion. Out of nowhere, with a lighting speed, a big raptor fell from the sky. In…
Uncertainty
Waiting. There is a time where you are not sure if what you have done is right. To me, the knowledge that you could have done nothing, and nobody would judge you, is not freeing. Living with knowledge that I could have done something, but did not is much worse. I had to chose. Once…
Chasing the waves
Sanderling (Calidris alba). Sanderlings are master predictors of the motions of the Ocean’s waves. As the waves go back and forth, the sanderlings find a perfect moment to begin their sprint run, dig some sand dwellers, and safely run away. For such a tiny body, they are master sprinters. Their beak is about the size…
Fashionista gulls
After my third attempt to photograph piping plovers at the Far Rockaway’s ended up in a failure, I began to feel disappointed. To protect the plovers, a part of the beach was closed. I walked for hours with my long lens camera, only to learn that the plovers moved to the other side. I wondered…
Mysterious crab
I walked confidently on the yellow sand, staring at the shells deposited on the beach by the powerful waves of the Atlantic Ocean. Movements of the water displaced tiny pieces of sand along the shore, exposing sand dwellers quickly snatched by the seashore birds. As we were walking along the water, my sister screamed suddenly,…
When the sounds disappear
My childhood house was located right by the forest. We used to call it the park, but only because there was a trail from one village to the next, parallel to a tiny stream. I would spend countless hours walking that trail. Regardless of the time, my ears would fill in with songs of birds,…
Preserving the unknown
One cannot miss what one does not know exists. A book by Michelle Nijhuis, Beloved Beasts, Fighting for Life in the Age of Extinction, presents several classic examples of animal species severely affected by human activities. Michelle describes animals which became symbols of conservation. Many such species are still with us, while some can only…
Insect pain.
As a child I remember looking at the sticky yellow tapes handing in people’s houses. Fly traps. Countless flies died on that yellow piece of tape, trying to escape in vain. Back in the 1990s, an upgraded version of a fly trap displayed in countless stores was an electric fly trap, with neon purple long,…
Full Moon in the sky
Look up and you will see the full Moon. Today, is one of the few days where all of the Moon’s mountains and craters are exposed, at least on the side of the Moon visible from the Earth. We cannot see the dark side of the Moon, maybe we can leave that to the astronauts…
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Marta Grońska-Pęski 