March 2011
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Calvert Vaux Park
Calvert Vaux was born in London (the family name rhymes with “fox”), immigrated to America, worked with Andrew Jackson Dowling, the founding father of American landscape architecture, and published Villas and Cottages, a landmark of American neo-Gothic design. Vaux’s great claim to fame, however, is teaming up with Frederick Law Olmsted to work on both…
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Brooklyn Stalactites
Here at Backyard and Beyond, we spare no wonder for our natural and unnatural world. In the Bergen St. F/G subway station in Brooklyn, these stalactites descend from both platforms. They’re classic soda straw formations, hollow through the center. They are also, obviously, not exactly like the ones you’d find in a cave. (Frankly, you…
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First Bees of 2011
I’ve seen my first bees of the year. I was in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where honey bees were working the crocuses: and the pollen-saturated Rose-Gold Pussy Willow:No other species of bees were seen, but the bumblebees should be out and about soon. There were a few flies, including this:A drone fly, Eristalis tenax. It…
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Winter is for waterfowl
Water, water, everywhere, and ducks amuck on much of it. Winter officially departs in just a little over a week (“here’s your hat/what’s your hurry?”), which means that many of the ducks found within the New York City area will shortly be heading north for their breeding grounds. Like Rick in Casablanca, they came here…
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March Turtles Beat the Hares
The Lullwater still had ice on it, but Prospect Park Lake itself was completely free of the stuff. I saw about a dozen turtles sunning themselves yesterday afternoon. These animals spent the last half year or so down in the mud at the bottom of the Lake in brumation, a form of dormancy that isn’t…
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Brooklyn begins to bloom
On Clinton Street just now, incontrovertible spring. And in Prospect Park, several tree species are flowering. Most of these early springers make modest little flowers, emerging before leaves, which give the trees a fuzzy appearance. This Chinese, or hybrid, witch hazel, meanwhile, makes a showy, odd-ball flower. (The American witch hazels, H.virginiana are unique because…
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Virgin Gorda Tests
This is the test of a sea urchin. (Test, from the Latin testa, meaning shell.) It’s unusual to find one intact. This was amid the rocks at Little Leverick Bay. These are emerald nerites, and they’re just over 1/8” long, but that emerald color does stand out in the sand. The animal, a snail, is…
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Virgin Gorda Reptiles
Virgin Gorda’s dry landscape was full of lizards, which was reason for rejoicing. (I haven’t seen so many since I lived north of Naples, Italy, in the early 1970s. I’ve yet to spot one of NYC’s somewhat famous Italian wall lizards, known to live in the Bronx and to be kestrel food.) Most were 3-5…
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Virgin Gorda Beachcombing con’t
I was fascinated by the varieties of dead coral found on the beaches.This crab shell was perfectly preserved.In the water of Little Leverick Bay, I picked up a young queen conch, Strombus gigas. This is the animal that supplies conch fritter-makers from the Caribbean to Brooklyn; in some places, it’s over-harvested, and becoming rarer. We…
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Virgin Gorda Beachcombing
Various intertidal snails were found on old coral, mangrove roots, rocks, coconut shells.
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