This past Monday, even though temperatures were only in the twenty-degree range, with "real feel" temperatures much colder, I took a walk in
Central Park; to see how our wildlife was faring in the bitter cold.
After all, beyond-frigid temperatures haven't stopped me from going to the park before. As you may recall, from
a previous post here on Blogger, I took a walk in Central Park earlier in the month when temperatures were far below what they were this past Monday.
The first photograph atop this entry was featured in the aforementioned blog entry, and I'm including it in this posting as I have a correction to make, for I stated that the view being featured in the image was a view from Bow Bridge, but I had a senior moment in stating this, the view is actually from the Oak Bridge, which I returned to Monday afternoon and took the following picture of the same subject from that vantage point.
The only difference is I zoomed in quite a bit (so a view of one of
NYC's sky-lines is not included here as it was in the image I took earlier in January). I zoomed so that I could capture a bird type whom I've never seen in Central Park, or anywhere else for that matter.
I've indicated this bird by affixing an orange square to the second photo below (which is a duplicate of the first one that's there).
A passerby indicated that the bird who was new to me was a type of Egret. However, I did not take her at her word before writing this post, as I don't want to be accused of reporting fake news, which I inadvertently did when I referred to the view from this bridge as being from the Bow Bridge; and not the Oak Bridge, as I've just stated.
Upon my realizing that I'd confused the Bow Bridge with the Oak Bridge, I thought of a passage from
Joan Didion's,
Goodbye to All That, an
essay on Didion's decision to leave NYC (which she ultimately moved back to years later):
".... All I could do during those years was talk long-distance to the boy I already knew I would never marry in the spring. I would stay in New York, I told him, just six months, and I could see the Brooklyn Bridge from my window. As it turned out the bridge was the Triborough, and I stayed eight years.
—-
In retrospect it seems to me that those days before I knew the names of all the bridges were happier than the ones that came later..."
Meanwhile, in terms of the bird who was new to me, I thought that I was ultimately able to find out his/her correct type from someone in my Twitter feed.
Susan M. Thom, Esq solved my mystery, after I tweeted images of this bird and asked for an identification (since I could not find it in my own research).
