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.

Also spotted in Brooklyn Bridge Park:

Our hominid ancestors of some two million years ago were far from top dog; in fact, they were the prey of a number of apex predators. But they also ate carrion killed by those predators. It is theorized that, working in large groups, they would chase off the predators and hold them at bay while others scraped meat off bones and smashed bones for the marrow. Besides evidence of cut marks on animal bones, there’s also this chemical evidence: the carbon isotope pathway in grasses is different from the pathway in most other plants, and since we are what we eat, the residue of these different forms of carbon can be measure in fossilized bones. Eaters of a vegetarian diet and eaters of meat (from grazers of grass) show it in their bones. But here’s where it gets really interesting: it was once assumed that tapeworms joined the human family with the domestication of animals like cattle, but tapeworms and hominids got together much farther back in time. Hominids probably picked up these intestinal parasites from the carcasses they shared with predators (of which there were many more species then), which included those predators’ remnant saliva, a vector, on the corpses.

We humans have large brains and small digestive systems for our size compared to other mammals. A high protein diet rich in animal fats seems to be responsible for both of these unusual characteristics. H. ergaster from 1.6 million years ago, seems to have had the body of a runner, and hairless humans can take the heat better than haired mammals, as long as there’s water available, so the notion of chasing down prey has been suggested. On the question of when hominids lost their body hair, public and head lice parted genetic ways circa three to four million years ago. And then there’s fish, high in Omega-3, another fine brain food. Raw fish is sushi, but raw meat is rather harder to digest, and requires a predator’s stomach, which genus Homo never seems to have had. So when did cooking come into the picture? Cooking foods animal and vegetable, raw food cultists notwithstanding, makes the nutrients in those foods more available to us. But evidence for fire isn’t really conclusive until 800,000 years ago in what we now call the Middle East, and that is an anomaly. Consistent evidence of fire comes in several hundred thousands years after that.
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Certainly the most haunting thing about our ancestors is that at any given time in the last couple of million years, Earth had more than one hominid species on it at the same time. This seems to have been true until up to about 14,000 years ago, when the last of Homo floresiensis became extinct. The better-known Neanderthals petered out some 30,000 years ago. It’s unusual for a mammal genus to be represented by only species. These spans of time aren’t even blinks geologically, although they push the limits of human comprehension.

We humans are particularly cooperative amongst ourselves, Republican ideologues aside, and uniquely socially-orientated, libertarians to the contrary, but, knowing ourselves as no other animal can know itself, can we assume these aspects of our personality and culture did not apply to similar but different life forms?

The insect perched here looks like a Genus Trichocera Winter Crane Fly. There are some 28 species in this genus in the the U.S. and Canada, and as their name suggests they can be found in the winter months, particularly in caves and mines.

As part of NYC Wildlife Week, I’ll be heading to Four Sparrow Marsh Sunday for a low tide walk starting at 1pm. Join us. It should be a spectacular day. Register for the event here, where you can also get directions. I take the Q35 from the Flatbush/Brooklyn College 2 train stop and get off at Toys R Us: we meet in the store’s parking lot.

Be prepared: we will probably have to do a little bushwacking. The tidal mud/muck requires water-proof boots. There may be ticks and mosquitos. It’s going to be hot so bring water (Toys R Us is the only retail around).

Also, there may be people hiding, perhaps living, in the phrag. (Hey, it’s Brooklyn…).

In short, you’ll love it.

Alas, former State Senator Carl Kruger, who once tried to sell the place, will not be joining us because of his appointment in the pokey.

Note: it’s not “Four Sparrows [plural] Marsh” ~ it’s Four Sparrow Marsh, after the Song, Swamp, Seaside, and Sharp-tailed sparrow species.

You can find everything I’ve written about Four Sparrow Marsh here.