Where's the Central Park news?

I'll be back from a family visit to California on November 20, and shortly thereafter... OWLS! In the meantime, here's a great photo of an unusual Central Park scene.

Photo by Bob Levy, who writes:

Here is some more “Easy Monet,” so to speak. I got this shot of the East Side buildings on Fifth Avenue reflected in the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir late in the afternoon. The fall colors of the trees are apparent if not explicit along the bottom of the image.

Woodpecker mystery

Bruce Yolton www.urbanhawks.blogs.com saw a woodpecker excavating a hole on November 3 and took the photograph above. You may be wondering why the bird is excavating in November. Surely it's a little early to be making a hole for nesting. The answer to the mystery: the woodpecker is making a roost hole where it will sleep in the winter.

According to Lawrence Kilham, author of Woodpeckers of Eastern North America, having a winter roost hole "may make the difference between survival and death during periods of extreme weather." I had to look up that quote in my own book Red-tails in Love, which includes a story about roost hole monitoring in the Ramble. In the paperback, that section starts in the middle of p. 154.