Don't kill anything while we're away!!

Tomorrow we're off to NH again for another little vacation week of hanging out in a nice cold lake with friends. I certainly hope the Parks Dept. doesn't take advantage of this opportunity to do any more secret, dead-of-night, nefarious activities. Coming back Saturday night, so the next Park Watch will be on Sunday.

Today, it looks like the ducks are taking the back the lake. When the geese were here, and since the geese were killed, the ducks have been hanging out mostly at the fringes of the lake, in the Lullwater, and by the Boathouse. Now it looks like they're returning to the middle of the big lake. Nature does indeed abhor a vacuum. Still no sign of any male mallards.

The Brooklyn Paper had a nice little article about the geese memorial. http://brooklynpaper.com/stories/33/30/dtg_deadgeesevigil_2010_07_23_bk.html
They estimated the crowd at over 100. Maybe my estimate of 200 was a bit high, but not too bad, I think.

And people do seem to be trying to keep the Park clean - many, many bags piled, but all right next to the trash cans. Now it's up to the parks Dept. to get to them before the raccoons do.

Ber, Man of Action

No longer is my English husband, descendant of aristocrats, scion of the once-ruling class, content to live with the motto "It is the duty of the working man to provide employment for the artisan." He has become quite the man of action himself. I'm not just referring to the time he crawled in through the kitchen window of the foreclosed house next door to turn off the water after a pipe burst, or the time he dealt with a man making rude comments to our beautiful daughter, or when he went in to get an abandoned grill out of the phragmites, or when he got some rope to actually remove fishing line that was caught in a high tree branch. Now he reports things in the park that need clearing up, AND THEY GET CLEANED UP!!!!!! He e-mails about things in the lake to the Prospect Alliance, and they get removed. And just yesterday, he emailed a contact about the long-dead raccoon and today, IT WAS GONE!!! Just like that!! Here are the before and after pictures. No more horrible smell! No more bit of ugliness in the beautiful Peninsula Meadow!

And even better news: there's a duck family in the lake. Happily ensconced in the middle of the appropriately named duckweed, munching away, hopefully safe from marauders, both human and geese. We had been wondering about the lack of baby ducks in the last few years, thinking it was some nefarious activity by the geese or humans or raccoons. So it was quite thrilling to see a nice duck family.