A Vinyl County Almanac

The New Haven Green. Open greenspaces like this one are quite common in New England towns and cities, and were used as communal grazing lands by early settlers (1) There’s an interesting hypothesis in the psychology of human aesthetic preference which holds that we can explain the modern prevalence of lawns and other open, grassland-like landscaping features, at least in part, by looking to our species’ evolutionary past. The idea is that because we likely evolved on the savannahs of east Africa, we have a deeply ingrained preference for open plains over other habitat types, such as dry deserts and dark, crowded forests. Thus, we continue to model our modern settlements after our evolutionary cradle by maintaining thousands of acres of open parkland. As far as I can tell, this idea was originally proposed by zoologist and educator John H. Falk in a 1977 article on lawns for Smithsonian magazine, in which he suggested that there may be a significant evolutionary basis for our landscape

Its finally May — the month when the spring migration really picks up and a firehose of colorful, tropical birds is let loose upon the Eastern forests of the United States! I’ve been feeling little droplets here and there while going about my everyday business — a prairie warbler stopping over in my parent's yard, a tanager singing beneath the noise of a tractor at work — and finally decided that it was time to stop by a favorite birding spot and really put some time into seeing what I could see before things calm down again in June. The spot I ended up settling on was Sleeping Giant State Park — 1500 beautiful acres of diverse habitats and plant communities scattered across a 739-foot-tall traprock ridge in the shape of person lying on their back. In addition to the realization that I’ve got pretty out of shape sitting around making maps all winter, I managed to find over twenty species of birds, including several recently arrived neotropical migrants. Below are four of my favorit