A walk in the park

We walked through Prospect Park this morning with Elise. She got to enjoy about half an hour off her leash, about five minutes of which she spent chasing her red rubber ball. Then I threw it off to the right of our little group and didn't watch its trajectory, and apparently she didn't either because she came back to us a couple seconds later without the ball. We walked over to where we'd thought it landed and looked everywhere for it, but it had apparently disappeared down some rabbit hole, or been snatched by another dog, or been swooped down upon by this neat hawk I keep seeing flying over the park during my morning runs. I only ever see it from underneath, and it appears to be about three and a half feet from wingtip to wingtip and has mostly white underwings with black spots on them. I looked up the types of raptors that inhabit the park this time of year, and several are listed, but all are described as being very, very rare in this season. Christina and I wonder if global warming has confused him and he's stayed behind when all the other birds have migrated. Then again, we're not sure if hawks migrate; we can easily imagine them plucking little rodents from snowy meadows.

Once off-leash hours ended, we hooked up Elise to her lead and walked her towards the tennis courts to look for a replacement ball. Neither of us had ever seen the courts before, and they turned out to be in a huge indoor complex, covered by temporary winter walls, across the street from one side of the park. No balls were therefore accessible. But the weather was cool and breezy, the sun was shining off all the yellow and red and orange leaves on the gingko, oak, and maple trees (among others, I'm sure, only I don't know which), and it was lovely just to walk alongside the lake and watch all the joggers and road bikers swish by us on our right. Eventually we reached the Audubon building and boat house, where there's a small bird exhibition, we think, on weekends from noon to five pm. We couldn't go inside because it was only about 9:30 in the morning, but we made a mental note to return to figure out what that hawk is doing here. We saw him again right about at this point.

From the Audubon center, there are a number of trails that cross through the center of the park, which is mostly wooded. Several, mostly man-made, waterfalls cascade over boulders and into large pools, where boats sometimes cut the water (in the case of the boat house pond), oxidized copper-plated bridges span the waterways, and the occasional fisherperson can be seen casting silvery lures. I wished I'd brought a flyrod out here, but then noticed all the low-hanging trees hugging the banks and reconsidered. Fishing is definitely allowed in both Central and Prospect Parks, though, which surprised both of us when we first learned it. We chose the waterfall path rather than the tall trees path, and walked through dense woods of yellow leaves and nary another person. We couldn't see or hear the city from inside our little forest. Elise was released from her leash in the absence of other people and she loped off into the woods, probably to eat smelly things in the underbrush. We passed a few signs indicating that this area "used to be part of a forest," and wondered why they said "used to," because it still looked a lot like a forest to us. Then we finally emerged onto East Park Drive, which crosses the park and exits into Grand Army Plaza, which has an enormous arch much like the Arc du Triumph (or whatever) in Paris (...or whatever). This one has bronze statues crusted all over it and probably represents something Revolutionary War-related. We should probably find out. Before we began our walk back to our apartment, we tiptoed through a little corner of the park, currently under repair, called the "Vale of Cashmere," where a fountain burbles into a leaf-strewn pool, creating speckled patterns on the surface. We considered pushing Elise in but didn't.

At this point Christina noticed something most interesting about how leaves change color. Look at the two photographs below: they're mostly the same, but some yellow and red leaves near the center are slightly rearranged in the second photo to show that where they'd previously overlapped (and where they'd also overlapped on the tree we picked them from), they'd remained yellow. So leaf-turning has something to do with exposure to light or other elements, presumeably. There's probably an easy answer to this, too, but we don't know it.