Apologies if you've already encountered the Owl Jolson Story. It's still the best story I can offer tonight

It turns out that the little owl dubbed Owl Jolson isn't a youngster but a saw-whet, a species of owl "that only grows to a height of 7 or 8 inches and to a weight of about 3 ounces."

by Ken

It turns out that I don't even have to explain why I'm offering this story, even though I'm coming late to it, of an owl-in-a-shoebox turned in at the NYC Parks Department's HQ in the Arsenal in Central Park. For once it's not only safe but gratifying to venture into the comments sections, and here's a comment that explains as well as I could why I'd rather spotlight this story tonight than, well, anything else I can think of.

It is really nice to read a story about people coming together to help a little injured living creature in need. Thank you for the wonderful story. Good luck, little owl and thank you to all the kind humans involved in the little owl's rescue and healing. May we all be as compassionate to the hurt and lost and may we all receive such compassion when we find ourselves vulnerable and unwell. Please keep us updated.

-- commenter JH of Brooklyn, responding to
Andy Newman's nytimes.com update on Owl Jolson

HERE'S THE ORIGINAL NYTIMES.COM "CITY ROOM" POST

ANIMALS AND WILDLIFE | October 12, 2012, 6:39 PM | 19 Comments

In a Shoebox, an Owl and a Mystery

By ANDY NEWMAN

Update, Oct. 15 | The owl appears to have head trauma but is recovering at a wildlife center on Long Island. Read the follow-up post. [No need to click through. You'll find the follow-up post below. -- Ed.]

A man walked into the parks department's headquarters in the Arsenal in Central Park on Friday afternoon and handed over a shoebox.

"He didn't stay, he didn't give a name," said Vickie Karp, a parks spokeswoman. "He just said, 'Here's an owl.'"

The man said the owl had flown onto his property in Sea Gate, Brooklyn, several days ago and had been sitting on the ground for a couple of days, Ms. Karp said.

The owl (see video below) was small. At first, parks workers thought it was a fledgling.

But Rob Mastrianni, an urban park ranger for the department who specializes in raptors, immediately recognized it as an adult northern saw-whet owl, a species that only grows to a height of 7 or 8 inches and to a weight of about 3 ounces. Saw-whets live in Canada and sometimes spend the winter in New York.

The owl refuses to fly, but the reason was not immediately clear, Ms. Karp said. Sometimes when saw-whets are frightened, she said, they will simply stay very still and appear very calm. The owl, dubbed Owl Jolson, has been turned over to rehabilitation experts at the Wild Bird Fund.

AND HERE'S ANDY NEWMAN'S UPDATE

(As commenter Stan G of New York points out: "You forgot the best part -- they named him Owl Jolson!")

ANIMALS AND WILDLIFE | October 15, 2012, 5:10 PM | 12 Comments

Rescued Owl Is Getting 'Cage Rest'

By ANDY NEWMAN

The grounded saw-whet owl we wrote about on Friday after it was dropped off at the parks department's headquarters in a shoe box is recovering quietly at a wildlife rehabilitation center on Long Island.

The little owl (saw-whets are among the smallest owl species, and this owl weighs three ounces) was first taken to the Wild Bird Fund on the Upper West Side, where rehabilitators recognized signs of head trauma.

"He had a bad head bang," said Rita McMahon, the director of the bird fund. "His left eye was more closed, and the pupil was dilated. It seemed like there was a bit of swelling."

To recover, Ms. McMahon said, the owl needs some time, and a cage big enough to flap around in, so on Saturday the bird was sent to Wildlife in Need of Rescue and Rehabilitation in Massapequa, N.Y.

There, Bobby Horvath, who has worked with many injured New York City raptors, reported Monday afternoon that the owl was spending a lot of time "just kind of hunkered down," though he added, "It becomes alert when we open the cage to drop food in."

One of the owl's wings is a bit droopy, Mr. Horvath said, but X-rays showed no broken bones, so the prognosis for full recovery and release (in Brooklyn, where the owl was found) remains good.

"It's just nutrition, cage rest, and we've got him on pain medication and an anti-inflammatory," Mr. Horvath said. "For now, you just keep it dark, quiet and as calm as possible."

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Okay, I admit it: I'm now officially caught up in the Jeremy Lin hoopla -- it really is a great story

The NBA player everyone's talking about, the Knicks' come-from-nowhere new starting point guard, Jeremy Lin, scored 28 points and notched 14 assists in today's come-from-behind win against the Mavericks.

by Ken

I had no idea when I noticed the Knicks game on the cable schedule last night that the game wasn't actually being played last night. But I was primed for seeing the Knicks a little after not watching a basketball game in -- well, I don't remember how long, that's how long it's been. I know I will sound like a grumbly coot when I say that for 10 years, probably more, I've thought of the game as having left me behind, turned into a scrum of egos and showboating that hasn't had much to do with the team game, still featuring those large talents, that I once loved.

I'm not embarrassed to admit that what's suddenly made me curious is Jeremy Lin, the Taiwan-born [UPDATE: No! commenter Karl points out that Jeremy was born in Palo Alto! Thanks, Karl!], Harvard-educated point guard who's standing the NBA on its ear after going undrafted out of college, having a wasted rookie season last year, and then spending virtually all of this season, until a couple of weeks ago, on the Knicks' bench, acquired to provide some emergency depth at point guard.

And now he's emerged. It turns out -- as I finally figured out after witnessing parts of another Knick victory this afternoon -- that the game I saw last night was a rebroadcast of Jeremy's monster game against the Lakers on Feb. 10, when he scored 38 points. Since that game actually took place, I see now, the Knicks had gone 3-1 before heading into action this afternoon.

Speaking of which, this afternoon I did an Urban Park Rangers walk in Van Corlandt Park in the Bronx. It was billed as a Revolutionary War walk, presumably themed to the Presidents Day weekend. The Parade Ground in the park is the scene of one of the skirmishes-and-retreats staged by George Washington's army in the Battle of New York, on the way to abandoning the area to the British. We crossed the Parade Ground and climbed Vault Hill, which offers a great view of the plain below and the city beyond.

Afterward, as I headed back to the 242 Street terminus of the no. 1 train, I was pretty sure I remembered that there's a pizza place in the commercial strip on Broadway above 242nd Street, and as I ate my slice (once again the only customer in the place, as I am these days more and more often when I venture into a local commercial establishment; Howie mentioned a conversation we had on the subject, and I'm still meaning to write about it; my anecdotal evidence of an economy in a state of collapse unlike anything I've seen in my lifetime), I eventually looked up at the basketball game on the little TV.

I hadn't paid the game any attention because I've got so much experience now not paying attention to basketball games. But there were a couple of guys in the joint now, watching (not buying anything that I could see, but watching), and I realized it was a Knicks game. The only thing was, they were down something like 76-66 in the 3rd quarter.

So I finished up, climbed the stairs to the subway station, and made my way home -- a pretty quick trip. And after I'd been home awhile, it occurred to me to just check and see how the game had turned out. Hey, even when I'm an ex-fan, I'm not the fair-weather kind who only tunes in when the team is winning.

Imagine my surprise to discover that the game wasn't over and the Knicks had in fact taken the lead, with, like, 3- or 4-some minutes to play. By now I had learned from the announcers that the Dallas Mavericks are like the league's best defensive team, and yet the Knicks had come back, and even opened a bit of a spread on them. Oh, the Mavs made a run, and it wasn't made easier by the fact that they've got a couple of great 3-point shooters, but at the buzzer the Knicks were on top 104-97.

One of the issues that's come up about Jeremy Lin now that he's no longer a one-week wonder is that of playing time. For someone who's had as little of it as he has in his two NBA seasons suddenly to move into the starting lineup, playing a position where he's handling the ball maybe 80 percent of the time his team has it -- I think ABC analyst Hubie Brown threw out that number (Hubie, as a longtime NBA coach, is very good at the mechanics of the game) -- now has to grapple with the rigors of playing 35 or more minutes per game.

I just looked at the final stats for today's game. He wound up playing an exhausting 45:36 (out of the total 48 minutes!), scoring 28 points with 14 assists and even 4 rebounds. Yes, there were also 7 turnovers, but jeez, consider where he's coming from -- and the caliber of the defensive team he was playing against.

Hubie Brown (an ex-Knicks coach, by the way), who also worked the Feb. 10 Knicks-Lakers game I saw last night, has clearly been won over. He loves the way Jeremy's ability to see his teammates all over the court on offense and to reliably get them the ball has reenergized them. Which is a good part of what makes his story such a great one: He plays a team game.

Of course the other part of what makes this such a great story is that until two weeks ago Jeremy was an NBA nobody, a player nobody had any use for, who has emerged seemingly out of nowhere. And now the opposition is no longer caught by surprise. Teams have all heard about him, probably seen him, and they're throwing their weight around, trying to throw him off his game, beat him down. But at 6'3", 200 pounds, he's not exactly the wilting type. He's got a lot to learn, and a lot of experience to gather, but it looks like this should be fun to watch.

I think it's 8 of 9 games the Knicks have won now, and they've climbed back up to .500. Hmm, I see they have a game scheduled for tomorrow.

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Beaches (of which, within some 17 hours, I set foot on two NYC area ones for the first time)

You should be able to click on this to enlarge, and if you do, I won't have to repeat what it has to say about horseshoe crabs. Oh, I may anyway.

by Ken

I didn't see the above Yahoo notice until just now, when I was scrounging online for "illustrative" material regarding Brooklyn's Plum Beach. (You'll notice here that it's sometimes spelled "Plumb Beach," but the general usage seems to be that it's Plum Beach, named for beach plum trees that are supposed to grow in this marshy area on Rockaway Inlet, east of the mouth of Sheepshead Bay (and, therefore, of the eastern extremity of Coney Island). But it gives a pretty description of the event I surprised the heck out of myself by taking such a journey from the conceptual-theoretical stage ("you know, I could actually do this, and it might be interesting") to the actual-journey stage. It was a journey that, from way-northern Manhattan, took more than the two hours I had allotted on the route I'd worked out (the no. 1 train to the no. 2 train to the B44 Limited bus to its terminus, then hoofing it) -- almost two and a half hours, in fact.

And at the several "junction" points, as it became clear that I wasn't going to come close to making it by 8pm to this place I'd never in my life heard of before let alone been to, I told myself that the sensible thing to do would be to chalk it up to a noble effort and head back home. Some other time I could complete the journey -- the beach, after all would still be there.

Yes, but would the horseshoe crabs?

So I didn't turn back at any of the points where I might have, and at nearly 8:30, when I finally saw up ahead what looked to be a bunch of people gathered in front of what seemed quite likely to be the Plum Beach Comfort Station (right), the designated meeting place, I began to imagine that perhaps I hadn't entirely missed the event. Indeed I hadn't!

I missed the start of Urban Park Ranger Andrew's discussion of horseshoe crabs, explaining that their habitat extends . . . oh, I don't remember, but something like from the Gulf of Mexico all they way up the east coast of North America (there are also Pacific horseshoe crabs, we learned, on the west coast of North America and the east coast of Asia), and whatever it is, it's also a basic bird migration path, because horseshoe-crab eggs, which apparently chock full of body-building fat and protein, are super-good eats for our feathered friends. And in our area, the salt-marsh beach of Plum Beach (Andrew thinks of the whole coastal region that is now Greater New York as essentially a giant salt marsh, albeit a now-much-compromised one) is prime mating territory for the horseshoe crabs during their mating season, which locally runs about two and a half months, from April to mid-June, with moonlit nights especially favored, not for romantic reasons, of course, but for the help it provides them in finding their way to the beach and finding each other, the only reason they come onto the beach.


As the sun set, we set out in search of these ancient creatures -- who, by the way, can go a full year without eating -- and found a lonely male, but also what looked to Andrew to be a mass of horseshoe-crab eggs, which matched the description he had just given in response to a question of what the eggs look like, but surprised him because normally the female (who's way larger than the male, by the way) buries the egg clusters in the sand to provide them some protection from predators from air, sea, and land. However, someone with a smart phone was able to provide googled confirmation horseshoe-crab eggs were indeed what we were looking at.

Considering how much Andrew was able to tell us about these remarkable creatures -- and there were lots of good questions from the assembled horsehose-crab voyeurs -- it was cheering when he wasn't sure about the answer and allowed that he doesn't know everything about horseshoe crabs. As darkness set in, the crabs became bolder about venturing onto the beach, and Andrew was able to pick up mating pairs of them, who disengage with great reluctance. By the time the official presentation drew to a satisfying close, and Andrew said he was going to continue walking the beach and anyone who wanted to join him was welcome to, a shrewd hard core of us -- more, apparently, than he expected -- eagerly clustered around him, and the best part of the night, with full darkness (but a few people carrying small lights so we could see something), ensued. The horseshoe crabs were doing it all over the beach, and we were privileged to witness an important piece of the hemisphere's ecological balance taking place before our amazed eyes.

I'm embarrassed to say that I've only recently become aware of New York's Urban Park Rangers, who are a treasure. They perform all sorts of functions for the city's Parks Department, but one of them is conducting terrific tours like this throughout the city's parks. (In the only one I've taken so far, of the water course of Brooklyn's Prospect Park, on a grimly overcast Sunday afternoon, I wound up having a one-on-one tour with Ranger Vinnie, which was shortened only a bit by an ensuing downpour. The Urban Park Rangers, I had been told, come prepared to do their thing come what may.)

The return trip from Plum Beach again took nearly two and a half hours, even with a spectacular connection to the returning B44 Limited bus. I wasn't even sure I knew where the return route started, but no sooner did I think I had found the correct bus stop than the correct bus rolled in to confirm it! Fortunately, with the holiday today, I didn't much care how late I got home. And while I know I spent nearly five hours in transit, what a night!

Then I was awakened about 5am by what I realized after a moment was a torrential downpour outside, which seemed to constitute a dramatic thumbs-down on some possible activities I'd scouted for Memorial Day. I could have done one or both of a pair of Central Park tours, in areas and/or from perspectives that would be new to me. Or there was a link I'd found to a walking tour of Jones Beach, the beach that Robert Moses build on an island off the south shore of Long Island in the '30s. In nearly 50 years of living in New York, for as much as I've heard the storied name of Jones Beach, I'd never set foot there.


When I tuned in a weather forecast, it seemed pretty insistent that the rain was over, and we had a good, sunny day in store, and so I duly dragged myself to catch the 11:10 Long Island Rail Road train to Freeport, successfully met the Shorewalkers group, and was eventually able to crowd onto an N88 bus, which I was delighted to discover took my regular unlimited Metrocard, and which duly slow-mo-ed its way along the parkway (also built by Robert Moses, naturally), on what had indeed developed into a prime beach day for the first weekend of "the season," and was eventually disgorged at the western side of the Jones Beach State Park.

It's a lovely spot, though less crowded than I would have expected. Just wait till Fourth of July, I was thinking. But I won't be there. It's a lovely spot, and I'm glad I did it, in the company of people familiar with the place, and it was even worth the $16.50 round-trip train fare to do it once. It's a beach. A nice beach, but just a beach. I can cross it off my "things to do, maybe" list, though.

And tomorrow it's back to work. Sigh. Well, at least I did something this weekend. And how was your holiday weekend?

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