Welcome to Madara's New York

I have blogs devoted to film and J-pop, but I also want one I can devote to the experience of living in New York City, either to tell some of the unique stories I've gathered from the past few decades or to post pictures I've taken of the city as it undergoes changes. I'm not going to launch into a long story in my first post, since this is basically a test entry to see how comfortable I am using Google's blog format. (My other blogs are on LiveJournal and Wordpress.)

So, first off I'd like to share pictures of something I encountered on Pelham Parkway in the Bronx recently. One Saturday at the end of March of this year, I spotted a squirrel that was colored differently from any other squirrel I'd ever seen in New York. To my eyes, it was brown.

The only previous time I'd seen a squirrel this color was when I visited Denver, Colorado back in June 2002. I checked with my brother, who's more of a wildlife expert than I am, and he declared that I'd seen a Red Squirrel, which is not native to these parts. How it got to the Bronx I couldn't say.

Since then, I've seen a gray squirrel with a red tail and a black squirrel with a red tail in the same area--they appeared to be young siblings--although I didn't have my camera at the time. So I'm assuming the original red out-of-town visitor mated with one or two local squirrels, which seems to have happened awfully quickly, unless the babies were already born when I saw the original red squirrel. I have to confess I'm not up on squirrel reproductive cycles.

Just to put this in perspective, here's a long shot of the area where these photos were taken:

That's the Pelham Parkway subway station on the left (the #2 line) and that structure with the yellow "Restaurant and Cafeteria" sign on it is a closed movie theater, the Globe. (More on that when I do an entry on closed movie theaters.) The tree where the squirrels live is just to the left of where I stood when I took this picture.

That's all for now. This seems to be working out fine. Time to look through my backlog of pictures, both new and old, to come up with some exciting entries.