June 2011
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Arches
It does us good to remind ourselves that Prospect Park is a synthesis of the natural and the unnatural. The park is a highly engineered production, with drainage tiles laid underneath the Long Meadow, and fire hydrants in the middle of the Midwood, and the old reservoir built into Lookout Hill.Yesterday, the delightful Christopher Gray,…
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The Monarchs Are Here
A male monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus, in the Battery Bosque yesterdy. You can see some examples of monarch caterpillars in my post from last August. (And you can tell this is a male, even this blurry, because of the small spots in the hindwing veins.) The Bosque, named after the trees that tower over it,…
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Beyond the Back 40
If you leave it alone, they will come. Oh, yes, they will. Daisy fleabane, Japanese knotweed, and some worts (perhaps a hogwort or two?) fill the back 2/3rds my building’s backyard. This veldt is beyond the fence containing my own Back 40 and under the purview of the upstairs neighbor, known here ’bouts as Stompy…
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Aphids
A fine crop of aphids are raising themselves in the Back 40. These tiny sapsuckers are a photographer’s challenge, a gardener’s nightmare. There are more and 1,300 species in North America, according to Garden Insects of North America. They generally reproduce asexually, with a sexual phase once a year (which produce over-wintering eggs). We may…
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Four Sparrow Marsh
Four Sparrow Marsh this early summer day, at low tide. While most everybody else in town was celebrating Gay Pride and the state’s passage of marriage equality (late Friday night, and about time, too), a few of us were being tormented by “mischievous and annoying insects.” I shouldn’t have loaned my head-covering mesh to friends…
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Fallout
The lighthouse keeper on Machias Seal Island — kept there by the Canadian Coast Guard to make sure the little island, claimed by both Canada and the US, stays Canadian, O Canada… but I digress — the lighthouse keeper took this sequence of photos on the night of May 24 this year. Bad weather caused…
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Old School
“The draining of the swamp lands is not a new idea. Such lands are not only unproductive of anything which can subserve any important purpose, but they are productive of numerous evils. Teeming with miasma, the home of mischievous and annoying insects they are blotches upon the otherwise fair face of nature. To tender them…
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Marsh Walk
Salt marshes are some of the most productive ecosystems we know of, but they have traditionally been treated as wastelands and dumping-grounds. On Sunday morning, I’ll be leading a tour of Four Sparrow Marsh, one of the last salt marshes remaining in New York City, for NYC Wildflower Week. If you’d like to come you…
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A Very Bad Acid Trip
“…we have underestimated the overall risks and that the whole of marine degradation is greater than the sum of its parts, and that degradation is now happening at a faster rate than predicted.” State of the Ocean Report, 6.20.11Some of the excess carbon dioxide we so heedlessly pump into the atmosphere is absorbed by the…
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Sumer is icumen in, Lhude sing cuccu! Groweþ sed and bloweþ med And springþ þe wde nu, Sing cuccu! Awe bleteþ after lomb, Lhouþ after calue cu. Bulluc sterteþ, bucke uerteþ, Murie sing cuccu! Cuccu, cuccu, wel þu singes cuccu; Ne swik þu nauer nu. Pes: Sing cuccu nu. Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu. Sing cuccu…
Backyard and Beyond 