Happy  National Library & National Wildlife Weeks, UESiders!! Yes, and add to that happiness that the plan to lift restrictions on NYC building size’s been defeated up in Albany!!  Not only that but that dusty patch that was only days ago a fact-of- life under the Aycock Pavilion is now:                                                                                                                                           New Sod at Aycock Then there’re the 2 ice seal species that now have habitat protection...  And the Nevada toad now protected (scroll down from the seals)…  Also looking like – fingers tightly crossed – we might actually have a Saturday devoid of precip!!  And then, how ’bout these March UES composting stats: Every Friday:  96th & Lex Compost Drop-Off 96th Street & Lexington, 7:30-11:30am Date Drop-Offs Bins Weight (lbs) 2/25 185 6 1,292 3/4 235 9 1,658 3/11 235 8 1,674 3/18 180 6 1,282 3/25 200 7 1,335 TOTALS: 1,035 D-Os 36 Bins    7,241 lbs. 2022 to Date (1/7- 3/25/22) Total Drop-Offs – 3.231;  Total Bins Filled – 96;  Total Weight – 19,425 lbs. Every Sunday:  91st Street/Asphalt Green Compost Drop-Off York Avenue & 91st Street.  7:30am-12pm Date Drop-offs Bins Weight (lbs) 3/13   75 3 522 3/20  105 4 740 3/27 60 5 372 TOTALS:  240 D/Os 12 Bins 1,634 lbs.     2022 to Date (3/13- 3/27/22) Total Drop-Offs – 240;  Total Bins Filled – 96;  Total Weight – 1,634 lbs. Then there’re the developments at our great market: Saturday, April 9th:  82nd Street/St. Stephen’s Greenmarket 82 Street between First & York Avenues, 9am-2pm Tabling with us will be our friends 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!! And Incredibilia Mangeria Margaret weighs in on those developments:   “Dear Greenmarketeers, Looking like it will be a nice day this Saturday and we’re expecting all of our favorite farmers to make the trip down (or up) to NYC to attend the market!! Add to that, we’ve just received  confirmation that Sikking Farm with their marvelous fresh cut flowers is planning to return on April 16th…  Just in time for Easter and Passover celebrations!! But this Saturday, do stop by the manager’s tent to see what we’re sampling this week.  (No question, last week’s yogurt, granola & apple syrup was a hit!! Oh, yes!!  You remember, right?  As always, our wonderful farmers need all our help with parking outside the market area!! See you at the market. Margaret“ Pretty great, huh??!!  Then there’s: FRIDAY, APRIL 22nd!!:  EARTHDAY 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…   Next up, virtual events: Until 11:59pm, Sunday, April 10th:  Cast Your Participatory Budgeting Vote A million bucks to be apportioned among our hood’s improvement projects of your choice!!  And voting couldn’t be easier online…   (If you’re either 11 years-old or older or in the 6th grade, you’re an eligible voter!!)  Sunday, April 10th, 2pm:  Pilgrim Hill & Its Cherry Trees Tour via Zoom  Join Central Park Conservancy guides for a special seasonal – and virtual – visit to one of the park’s most eye-catching April destinations, Pilgrim Hill and its unequaled spring bloomers, the Yoshino cherry trees. Suggested donation, $10.  To sign up… Thursday, April 14th, 2-4pm:  AM Seawright’s Weekly Virtual Knitting Social on Zoom  The weekly UES virtual classic that draws our hood’s abundance of neighbors who combine community interests and a love of knitting!!  To RSVP…  Wednesday, April 20th, 4pm:  Birdsong Essentials – Enjoying Songbirds This Spring via Zoom Spring into the season of cascading whistles, trills and, chirps a cascade of whistles, trills, chirps and other bird-made melodies!!  Learn how to identify those sounds and the bird who make them and more…  Wisdom imparted by  American Bird Conservancy experts!!  Free.  To register… Keeping our activist instincts sharply focused and honed: Want all our UES compost sites back??  No less an entity than GrowNYC – the folks who’ve for years orchestrated compost collection at our 2 markets, at 70th Street/Robbins Plaza, 96th & Lex and citywide –  is asking for our signatures to politely but vigorously request the mayor restore the NYC compost collection program in its entirety!!  To sign… Widening the lens: Should you believe yet another proposed fracked gas pipeline – this one running from West Virginia, through Virginia and on to North Carolina – should be cancelled out… Somehow, the widely supported NYS ban on gas in new construction – the All-Electric Building Act – with more co-sponsors than any other green legislation and vaunted in the Gov’s State-of-the-State has disappeared from the latest version of the new budget…!!  No, not stopping the beat the compost drum: As our mayor/DSNY keep NYC’s compost collection program minimal in the name of cost, a first class PR firm seems to have been retained… And now for some (mostly) soothing diverting diversions:  Spring hikes in the Adirondacks for mature folks…  An introductory “How to Retrofit Your High Rise” course…  Smithsonian photo contest winners…  NYC H2O’s first chapter in its great new Storymaps series: “Exploring the Croton“ examining the history of NYC’s first watershed/reliable drinking water supply…   When a baby squirrel falls from its nest…                                                         NYS (really interesting) invasive species news…  A newsletter to get to know:  “Latest Buzz” from the New York Getting to know NYC Beekeeper Association…  The lowdown on rotisserie chicken…    “Get ticked off“ (as in ticks off!!)…   A national composting policy (!!)…  The Fish Flag Art Contest for kids 5-18…  What’s happening down at Solar One/Stuy Cove Park…  To bring the Puppetmobile to one of our UES parks…    Moving on to the Hudson River Almanac: 3/15 – Hudson River Estuary: Prior to 2010, today was traditionally the first day of commercial shad season, the first day when you were allowed to set or drift a gill net in the Hudson River for American shad. However, that did not imply that the fish would be there. American shad arrived from the sea at their own time, a time that primarily coincided with the right water temperature. Meltwater from late winter snowstorms, especially in the High Peaks of the Adirondacks, would suppress the warming of the river and push the date out. Once the river reached the mid-40s Fahrenheit, the males, or buck shad, would begin nosing up the river, a sinuous journey that allowed them to slowly acclimate to the lessening salinity. In the weeks that followed, more and more female, or roe shad would ascend the river, all heading above the salt to the freshwater reach to spawn from Hyde Park to the head of tide at Troy. Eventually, the run would even out, bucks and roe, before A Shad Fisherman 3/16 – Manhattan: Our Hudson River Park’s River Project staff checked our sampling and collection gear that we deploy off Pier 40 in Hudson River. Our pots and traps did not contain any fish today, but we did pull up grass shrimp, blue mussels (Mytilus edulis) and, for the first time in a while, a Beroe’s comb jelly! – Natalie Kim, Zoe Kim A Beroe’s Comb Jelly 3/17 – Staten Island, New York City: I watched, today, as double-crested cormorant repeatedly dived for fish in Wolfes Pond, a freshwater lake on Staten Island. One surfaced with a large gizzard shad clenched in its serrated bill. Tipping its head back, the bird began the long and tortuous task of swallowing the fish. – Rob Brauman That Double-Crested Cormorant 3/18 – Hudson River Watershed:  Full moon. Among indigenous peoples, full moons have long been labeled with names that are rooted in oral traditions, tribal memories, and ethnographic accounts. Among Mohican people, whose ancestral homeland lies within the Hudson River watershed, the March full moon is known as the Crow Moon (Kã’Kã’koowe keesok). Tribal translations of full moons pre-date colonization and generally reflect the seasonality of the lunar phase. Moon phases, in fact, are used by indigenous people as measurements of time. – Larry MaddenAs for the Fish of the Week: 3/17 – Hudson River Watershed: Fish-of-the-Week for Week 164 is the Atlantic cutlassfish (Trichiurus lepturus), number 216 (of 236) on our watershed list of fishes.  An Atlantic Cutlassfish!! The Atlantic cutlassfish is the only member of the snake mackerel family (Trichiuridae) documented for the watershed. They are found in circum-tropical and temperate waters of the world. In the Atlantic, they range from Cape Cod to Argentina, being much more common south of Chesapeake Bay. In our area, they are designated as a temperate marine stray. They favor muddy bottoms of shallow coastal waters, often entering estuaries and feeding on fishes, squid, and crustaceans. The Atlantic cutlassfish, with its large, fang-like teeth, looks like a creature from a nightmare. They are elongate, strongly compressed, with a strap-like body, silver to metallic blue, and a dorsal fin that runs from its head to the tip of its tail. From Greek, its genus translates to hair, and its trivial name to head, thus their other common name, largehead hairtail. Briggs and Waldman (2002) consider them rare in the New York Bight with two old records from Gravesend Bay, Brooklyn (1897 and 1901). There is one Hudson River estuary record, from Indian Point (river mile 42) 1985, a 165 mm (6.5-inches) juvenile. – – Tom Lake And This Week’s Mighty Fine Bird…  Make that 12 Birds of the Week…  The first of which is: The Green Kingfisher Doesn’t get better than spring green, UGS Eco Fact of the Week: Nearly 50 billion pieces of litter are estimated to exist along U.S. roadways and waterways today, meaning each U.S. resident would need to pick up 152 pieces of litter to collect it all, according to the Keep America Beautiful 2020 National Litter Study. Eco Tip of the Week:  Recycle those no longer needed crutches at the Hospital for Special Surgery, 535 East 70th Street!!2022 Compost collected at 96th & Lex (to date from 1/7/2022) – 7,231 lbs.;   91st & York (to date from 3/13) – 1,634 lbs. 2021 TOTALS at 96th & Lex (4/2/21-12/31/21) – 48.581 lbs/ (24.25 Tons)  2020 TOTALS (from 1/9/20-3/25/20):  12,522 lbs. (6.25 Tons) 2019 TOTALS:    43,417 Pounds  (21.7 Tons) 2018 TOTALS:  23,231 Pounds (11.65 Tons)