To get to the supermarket, I walk from the apartment where we’re cat-sitting through Danehy Park in North Cambridge. Danehy Park is built on top of a landfill. It has soccer fields, baseball diamonds, a couple of playgrounds, and a few picnic tables under the trees that grow along the main bike path. There are generally quite a few people, and some dogs, in the park — not the kind of place where you’d expect much in the way of wildlife.<\/p>\n
Yet without even looking very hard, I saw three bird nests on my walk across the park: two American Robins nesting in trees right over the bike path, and a Northern Mockingbird nesting in some shrubs right next to one of the playgrounds. I also heard a Flicker, some Common Grackles, several Song Sparrows, and several Red-winged Blackbirds — presumably, these were all males singing to define their nesting territory. It’s remarkable that so many birds could live in such a heavily developed landscape, in a limited ecosystem with apparently very little biodiversity. This made me wonder about the fecundity that I might have seen in pre-Columbian times.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
To get to the supermarket, I walk from the apartment where we’re cat-sitting through Danehy Park in North Cambridge. Danehy Park is built on top of a landfill. It has soccer fields, baseball diamonds, a couple of playgrounds, and a few picnic tables under the trees that grow along the main bike path. There are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,60],"tags":[359],"class_list":["post-1369","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-boston-cambridge","category-nature","tag-passerines"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1369"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1967,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1369\/revisions\/1967"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1369"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1369"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1369"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}