Happy National Peanut Butter and Jelly Day, UESiders!! Not only that!! Could possibly/maybe/they’re actually predicting that we could experience a non-Arctic Saturday/Market Day without precipitation??!! As we cross all fingers: Every Friday:  96th & Lex Compost Drop-Off 96th Street & Lexington, 7:30-11:30am 2022 to Date (1/7=2/28/22): Total Drop-Offs – 2.196;  Total Bins Filled – 60;  Total Weight – 12,184 lbs. Every Sunday:  91st Street/Asphalt Green Compost Drop-Off York Avenue & 91st Street.  7:30am-12pm  Week 1 – 1 Bin;  Week 2 – 2 Bins   Week 3 – 3 Bins!!  Poundage to come!!    Saturday, April 2nd:  82nd Street/St. Stephen’s Greenmarket 82 Street between First & York Avenues, 9am-2pm With us will be the great folks of American Pride Seafood, Bread Alone, Ballard’s Honey,  Hudson Valley Duck and Haywood’s Fresh, Samascott,  Nolasco, Ole Mother Hubbert, Valley Shepherd,  Hawthorne Valley and Gajeski Farms!! Can’t get enough spinach and arugula greens!!  Those wonderful eggs!!  Scallops!!  Yoghurt!!  Chicken pot pie!!  Mushrooms!!  Whole grain bread!!  Freshest herbs!! (You’re right!!  Uber Excellenta Market Manager Margaret is totally busy preparing for the coming wonderful, great, abundant spring!!) Then there’s: Closing: Sunday, April 3rd:  Puppets of New York Exhibition 1220 Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, 10am-6pm Yes, our last chance – at least for a while – to see Lamb Chop with your very own eyes and introduce younger family members/friends not only to the most classic but the art’s worldwide and centuries-long reach!!  Members, free.  Non-members, $20..  Senior non-members, $14.  Children, free.  For timed tickets (essential)…                                                                                                                        You Know Who!! FRIDAY, APRIL 22nd!!:  EARTH DAY 2022 AT UNION SQUARE!! 12-7pm Booths featuring dozens of environmental organizations…  Speakers live and virtual…  Music and more!!  For the complete rundown (where there’re also links to virtual Earth Days 2020 and 2021!! Saturday, April 23rd:  Compost by Bike – An Earth Day Community Ride  Meet at Central Park West, 110th Street & Lenox Avenue, 9:30am-2pm  Join the Lower East Side Ecology Center’s great folks (compost collectors at Union Square and many another Manhattan site) for a 12-mile composting community ride from Harlem through Central Park to the East Village!! In celebration of Earth Day, they’ll then show you how NYC’s food scraps get recycled on a local level at 4 community composting locations!!  To register… Saturday, April 23rd:  Bee A Pollinator/Earth Day Service Day Queens County Farm Museum, 12-4pm Come to lend a hand sifting compost..  With the Farm’s spring clean-up of its Children’s Garden. mulching and weeding…  All topped of with an apiary talk by the resident beekeeper!!  Then leave with a compost giveback, Adopt-a-Worm composting tips,  a tractor-drawn hayride ($5/person), a self-guided scavenger hunt, and free giveaways!!  Think a day of service, learning and fun!  For complete details and to sign up… Sunday, April 24th:  Randall’s Island Farm Day Randall’s Island, 10am-1pm Celebrate Earth Day plus two days by volunteering  to restore the Island’s farm wetlands and marsh habitats!!  Or just bring the kids and enjoy the great, green RI environment!!  For more and to register… Turning the page to virtual events: Wednesday, April 6th, 6-7pm:  Saving Edgar Allen Poe’s Cottage – A Case Study for the Lay Preservationist via Zoom Time and again, it’s been Joan/John Q. Public’s who’s stepped in to save NYC’s built history!!  But now and thanks to Historic District Council’s Lay Preservationist class, neighborhood defenders of architectural treasures can acquire the basic skill set so save the irreplaceable!!  Members and senior, $15.  Non-members, $20.  For further details and to sign up… Thursday, April 7th, 2-4pm:  AM Seawright’s Weekly Virtual Knitting Social via Zoom  Start with a wonderful bunch of UESiders, add their perspectives on local interests large and small and top off with a 120 minutes of productive and soothing knitting!!  To RSVP…  Thursday, April 7th:  Creating Urban Habitats (From Parking Lots to Parks) via Eventbrite Another winner from the great iDig2Learn…  This time out, Rebecca McMackin, Director of Horticulture at Brooklyn Bridge Park and ecological horticulturist, shares her knowledge on “how to create stunningly beautiful gardens that also provide a thriving wildlife habitat in the heart of an urban setting!!”  Co-presented by Cornell Tech and Roosevelt Island Operating Corporation!!  Free.  For further details and to register… Thursday, April 28th, 6-7:30pm:  Cooking with Food Scraps Virtual Workshop via Zoom Lower East Side Ecology Center and the Mulberry Street Library present how we can not  only reduce food waste but in the greenest and most delicious way!!  Free.  To sign up… Activism time: If you believe protections for the Florida panther should be maintained… Should you think the EPA should move to cut air pollution, protect communities from heavy vehicle emissions and address the climate crisis…   Next up…  Diverting diversions:   PBJ Day, all well and good, but then there’s how to construct and grill the perfect burger…  In search of wild figs…  “Godfather” locations in NYC…  Conqueresses(!) of whooping cough…  Norway’s winning Winter Olympics approach…  NYC‘s Starrett-Lehigh Building at 90…  Growing epic tomatoes…  Evolution of a NYC outdoor group…  Organic veggie seeds…   NYS April birding dates (scroll down)…  The NYBG’s Master Composter Class…  How best to help stranded seals (scroll down)…  Owlets hatching at the Cornell Lab… Moving on to the Hudson River Almanac: 3/16 – Town of Saugerties: Under warm sunshine, I encountered my first adult butterfly of the season today, a mourning cloak. The butterfly spent the better part of an hour imbibing on wet, muddy soil in my yard. It appeared to be tanking up for the first time after a long hibernation. – Steve Chorvas                                                                                                                   That Mourning Cloak Butterfly 3/19 – Hudson River Watershed. While the forecasted rain didn’t arrive until late and in some locations, was joined by thunder and lightning, the migration of forest amphibians to vernal pools continued tonight. More than sixty stalwart volunteers of the Amphibian Migrations and Road Crossings Project collected and submitted migration data from across eight counties in the estuary watershed. Similar to March 7, they observed a range of weather, from no rain to downpour, with most experiencing light rain. The average reported air temperature was 55 degrees Fahrenheit.                                                                                                                          A Spotted Salamander Preliminary data indicated that volunteers counted 16 species and 2,263 amphibians (1,619 live/644 dead), and assisted 1,484 salamanders, frogs, and toads across roads. They reported highest numbers for spring peeper (602 live/243 dead) and spotted salamander (400 live/145 dead), with lower numbers of wood frogs (154 live/24 dead) than observed earlier in the month, as they near the end of their mating season. Depending on local conditions, migration to breeding pools may continue on the next warm, rainy nights and in some locations, amphibians may already be leaving pools and returning to the forest. If you can, it’s best to avoid driving on these rainy nights of late winter and early spring, since many salamanders and frogs need to cross roads on their breeding migrations and even on low-traffic roads, mortality can be high.You can find more information about the Amphibian Migrations and Road Crossings Project in the NYSDEC press release at https://www.dec.ny.gov/press/124870.html or by visiting the project website at https://www.dec.ny.gov/lands/51925.html.  – Laura Heady, Emma Clements 3/24 – Manhattan: Our Randall’s Island Park Alliance Staff did a bit of waterfowl monitoring today. We found a red-breasted merganser along the Bronx Kill, as well as a mute swan, mallards, and many gulls of mixed species. At least two of them were great black-backed gulls. Along the way, we came upon five Canada geese, a pair of buffleheads, and a double-crested cormorant. Dissolved oxygen (DO) in the Bronx Kill was 11.0 ppm and the salinity was surprisingly high at 24.0 ppt. – Jackie Wu (Check out this flock of buffleheads!!)                                                                       3/25 – Manhattan: It is nearing the season for the great northward brant migration to the Arctic. Many thousands winter throughout the Gateway National Recreation Area, in particular Sandy Hook (NJ). On my walk home today, I found eighty of them on the grass just north of the 103rd Street footbridge along the Harlem River. – Jackie Wu Then there’s the Fish of the Week being:3/21 – Hudson River Watershed: Fish-of-the-Week for Week 165 is the orange filefish (Aluterus schoepfii), number 231 (of 236) on our watershed list of fishes.                                                                                                                   An Orange Filefish The orange filefish is one of two members of the filefish family (Monacanthidae) documented for our watershed. They are a reef-associated marine species found from Nova Scotia to Brazil, including Bermuda and the northern Gulf of Mexico. In our area they are considered a temperate marine stray.Orange filefish are “paddle-shaped,” deeply keeled, strongly compressed, and overall olive-gray to rich orange, with large yellow blotches and red-orange spots. They share an almost magical trait with a few other fishes, in that they can change their color quickly to match their surroundings.Their stout first dorsal spine that they raise when they feel threatened, is a good diagnostic feature. They can get to 24 inches long but are generally smaller. Orange filefish prefer living in sea grass beds or other submerged aquatic vegetation; their small terminal mouth has specialized incisor teeth on the upper and lower jaw which they use to graze on a variety of plants, including algae and sea grasses.Briggs and Waldman (2002) tell us that orange filefish are uncommon in the New York Bight. We have just two records for the watershed from the American Museum of Natural History’s collection of fishes: August 1966 (no location or size documented), and September 1987 (149 millimeters[mm]) caught by Normandeau Associates at river mile 29. – Tom Lake The Bird of the Week never disappoints:                                                                                                       The Black-and-White Warbler  Happy availability of the 1950 Census, UGS Eco Fact of the Week:  Honey bees are an introduced species, not wild, don’t need protecting and are federally classified as livestock!!  It’s our native, pollinating bees that’re so endangered!!  (Thank you,iDig2Learn, for the heads up!!) Eco Tip of the Week:  Recycling of clean mascara wands has resumed!!  For new and improved instructions…  2022 Compost collected at 96th & Lex (1/7/2022 – 2/25/2022):  2,196 Drop-Offs; 60 Bins; 12,184 Tons  2022 Compost collected at 92nd & York (from 3/7/22):  TBA2021 TOTALS at 96th & Lex, 4/2/21-12/31/21: 223 bins’ 6.871 Drop-Offs, 48,581 lbs. (24.25 Tons)2020 TOTALS (All 4 UES Drop-Offs) 1/19//20-3/25/2020:   294 bins; 12,522 lbs. (6.25 Tons)    2019 TOTALS (All 4 UES Drop-Offs): 43,417 lbs. (21.7 Tons) 2018 TOTALS: 23,231 lbs. (11.65 Tons)