The best meteors in years?
Saturday-Sunday, August 11-12: It’s all due to a backwards comet. All we need are mostly clear skies.
Nature
Day of the Bird at Storm King Art Center
Sunday, August 12: One of the thought-provoking works on view is Birds Watching by Jenny Kendler, current artist-in-residence with the Natural Resources Defense Council. It’s a site-specific installation of 100 reflective aluminum signs, each depicting a large scaled, realistic bird’s eye. Each represents a species of bird facing the threat of extinction due to climate change. The birds are watching us humans, it seems to say, to find out what we’re going to do about it.
Creature comforts
State wildlife expert Richard Thomas found that a woodchuck could (and does) chuck around 35 cubic feet of dirt in the course of digging a burrow. If a woodchuck could chuck wood, Thomas estimated, it would chuck an amount equivalent to the weight of the dirt, or 700 pounds, which is a big pile.
Shindig in Saugerties
Saturday, July 21: Feed watermelon to rescued pigs and learn how to cook vegan delicacies at Catskill Animal Sanctuary’s celebration
Schumer to NASA: Send astronaut for Walkway’s new Starwalk program
The senator’s request has been honored: An astronaut will be in attendance for a September installment of the Walkway’s guided nighttime talks and sky observations.
Walkway Over the Hudson hosts new Starwalk series
Sunday, July 15: View the wonders of the night sky from 212 feet above the Hudson River.
The wolf-like coyote in our backyard
The cunning and adaptable coyote was deified by the Native Americans and persecuted by the U.S. government. But as other predators were killed off, the coyote thrived, mating with wolves and producing a hybrid that now roams the fields and forests of the Northeast- including the Hudson Valley.
Kestrels, the smallest of falcons, are on the decline and scientists aren’t sure why
Just a few minutes’ drive to the south of New Paltz, in the Shawangunk Grasslands National Wildlife Refuge, recently-hatched kestrels are fighting for their lives.
A focus on the strange Evening Star
During the next three months, from now through September, Venus will visibly shift to the left. Each evening at nightfall, it will still hover at about the same height. But it will continually migrate south, or leftward, as it marches through the zodiac through Cancer, Leo, Virgo and into Libra.
What’s on deck at the Clearwater Festival
Saturday-Sunday, June 16-17: More than any other established music festival, the Clearwater’s Great Hudson River Revival is directly associated with activism and the environmental movement via the imprimatur of its founder, Pete Seeger. This year’s performers include Jeff Tweedy, Rhiannon Giddens, Ani DiFranco, The Mavericks, Beth Orton and They Might Be Giants.