It’s awkward, even intimidating, to restart this blog after one of its periods of quiescence – especially one as long as this. Let’s see, my last post was in . . . January? Gulp.

It’s not as though there was anything particularly dramatic about this Brooklyn Sunday. The suffocating heat has loosened its grip ever so slightly, but by the time I’d run and biked my way from Park Slope to Prospect Heights, I was soaked in sweat. I had let the availability of CitiBike “Bike Angel” points determine my route. For the uninitiated, the corporate parent of New York City’s bike share program is Lyft, a company that knows a thing or two about motivating non-employees, and I’ve allowed myself to be sucked into their Bike Angel program, whereby riders earn credits, membership extensions and cold hard cash by shuffling bikes from overstocked stations to ones where bikes are in short supply. It’s manipulative as hell, and a source of cheap labor, of course, but it also gives me a couple of hundred dollars a month, and meshes nicely with my much-reduced running program. I trot along, picking up and delivering bikes along the way, and call it a workout.

So it was the prospect of a 12-point (triple bonus points, baby!) drop-off that took me to the corner of Underhill and St. Johns Place, where a seemingly eternal construction fence around a ruined building has been a magnet for street art for years – long enough to earn a listing on Google Maps. It’s the “Underhill Walls,” evidently.

And what should greet me, as I turned the corner on my Citibike, but a Hooded Warbler, one of my favorite birds. Was that a Piping Plover beneath it, seemingly unfazed by a Peregrine Falcon? And a Short-eared Owl gliding from one panel to the next? Yes, yes, and yes.

All are birds that regularly grace Brooklyn with their presence, albeit not in the kind of proximity depicted in the mural at the top of this post. The same cannot be said for the Allen’s Hummingbird – a Southwestern species – but that’s artistic license for you.

The birds that caught my eye were just part of a larger eco-themed installation. Here are a few more panels that I found particularly arresting:

(Yes, that’s real trash incorporated into the work.)

And finally, this admonition:

Let’s rise to the challenge. Biking more and driving less isn’t a bad place to start.