Another commercially available aphid eater is the Convergent Lady Beetle (Hippodamia convergens), which is exported out of California:Like the Multicolored Asian Lady Beetle, this is also a variable looking species, but it usually has 13 spots and is not nearly as round as the MALB. Found this one on the sidewalk in the Gowanus. Commercially available lady bugs tend to fly out of your garden when released ’cause they ain’t working on Maggie’s farm no more….

I also saw a Peregrine cruise overhead as I was about to cross Court St. It landed on one of the arms of the cross atop SS Paul & Agnes, the highest thing south of Atlantic Avenue in my neighborhood. It’s a regular perch for raptors.

The blurb on Charlton Ogburn, Jr.’s The Winter Beach (1966) says it’s “timeless,” but no, it’s very much a piece of its era. Ogburn traveled down the east coast in the early 1960s and he was mostly bummed out at what he found of the post-war boom. The environmental movement, although there were clarions in the wilderness like Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring was published in 1962, was only just beginning; the Cuyahoga River didn’t burn its way into the nation’s consciousness until 1969; most of the landmark clean air and water legislation wouldn’t come until the 1970s. Ogburn is marvelously descriptive about the natural world and philosophic about the human one – rightly wondering why the Middle Eastern monotheisms have such animas towards nature, this world as opposed to some wishful-thinking about another.

Recommended to me by a friend, I tracked the book down at Brooklyn Public because I am a great fan of the spare, elemental beaches of wintertime. I’ve done a lot of my winter beaching on Nantucket, and it turned out Ogburn went to the island on the old slow ferry from Woods Hole, probably not too long before I first went there as a toddler. This passage is worth quoting at length, particularly if like me you’ve seen the crazed growth what I call “SUV-houses” on the island: ridiculously over-scaled behemoths trouncing the island’s compact architectural heritage. (The average size of the American house has doubled since the 1950s, while the average family size has shrunk; while Nantucket, trophy-house location for our economic masters, has probably seen a quadrupling of the average house size – many of these monstrosities, known so quaintly as “compounds,” are empty most of the year.)

“It was the past that Nantucket preserved that was home – a past that was of human scale, for which, indeed, perhaps most of us are in one way or another homesick. The industrialists and big-time panderers to human weakness and greed – the advertisers, the entertainment-mongers, the commercial land-developers and their like – have not found Nantucket a fruitful field or have been restrained by law. Nantucket is of a time before we were dwarfed and denigrated by the hugeness of a machine-built civilization having for its standards the common denominators of a mass market. Its character is of the days when it was the natural world that was vast and overpowering, when the communities into which men and women drew together in their common interests, out of necessity, had, it is evident, some of the intimate quality of a gathering around a campfire. One need not be enamored of the past as such to feel the appeal of an order of things that was essentially human, to which a person’s relationships were primarily human, not institutionalized and mechanical, when even material objects, being the product of human hands, had a warmth and life.”

Nantucket still has some eight hundred homes built before the Civil War. This is one of the richest concentrations of such historic buildings in the country. One of my favorites is 23 Milk Street.The place was built in 1750 and just re-shingled this past winter. Family friend Kenneth Duprey lived here for many years, and the house is the star of his 1959 book Old Houses on Nantucket (it’s been reprinted several times). It is absolutely dominated by the massive chimney, a density of brick that makes a small house even smaller inside. According to a couple of real estate sites, it’s 1,566 square feet. The chimney is fed by five fireplaces, including the kitchen (I remember Ken’s cat in the bread oven nook of the kitchen fireplace.) The phrase that leaps to my mind about such 18th century places is that they are “ship shape,” built small both because of the lack of resources and a mentality of modesty.
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Interesting life, Ogburn’s: a WWII vet, he wrote a memoir of the Burma Campaign, which was turned into a movie. He worked for the State Department and was an early critic of the Vietnam insanity. He was a big time “Oxfordian,” those damn fool fantasists who like to think no-account aristo Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare.The “lights” over the door; perhaps my favorite of all architectural details.

Could it be their multiple optical systems, including compound eyes and UV sensors? Could it be their one hundred thousand cuticular receptors, allowing them to feel their way along? Or the chemosensory pores that connect their dendrites to the water? Whatever it is, they can smell the pheromones…A huddle of males around female mostly-buried in the sand under the clump of seaweed. Horseshoes started their evolutionary journey something like 450 million years ago. They predate the dinosaurs, and, needless to say, the species that chops them into bait, grinds them into fertilizer and chicken feed, and sucks their blood for human medicine. There are four species, three in the Indo-Pacific (where they are also eaten by H. sapiens), one in the Atlantic. Related to the trilobites and the arachnids, they are not crabs; they survived the Permian-Triassic Extinction that killed off nearly all other ocean life. It is fashionable to call them “living fossils,” but that suggests a simplicity that the reality belies. The full and new moons of May and June bring them in-shore to mate and lay their eggs in the sand at the high tide line up and down the east coast. NYC is no exception. Jamaica Bay has been prime nesting habitat since the retreat of the ice.
Not all of them return to the sea. There are more than a dozen dead in this photo. Legion are the hazards of being a Horseshoe crab.Between the devil (you will know him by his works) and the deep blue sea, there are a lot fewer Horseshoes than there used to be, a situation which has ramified throughout littoral habitats and their food chains. As a result, the animals are much studied, with censuses conducted up and down the coast this time of year. This tag, one of five we saw among the several hundred crabs about an hour before high tide, had only been attached two nights earlier by a team from NYC Audubon.
Pointing out some anatomy on the underside, where the appendages, including the chelicerae, and book gills make for a fascinating contrast to the helmet-like topside. Note blade of Spartina in hat band… but that’s a whole other story. Thanks to Traci for the photo.

Turtles have been around for some 215 million years. They are older than their fellow reptiles the lizards, snakes, and crocodiles. A Snapper in particular, lifting its shell high, spiky tail dragging behind, has a dinosaurish look to it when it walks.

While wondering around the cemetery thinking about turtles, it dawned on me that the readiest source of earth there for a nest was a freshly dug grave.

Prospect Park has Snappers, too.

NYC salamanders have also been the subject of another study that found urban woodland specimens tougher than their country cousins when it comes to battling a pathogenic fungus that’s taking a high toll of amphibians around the world.