July 2012
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Friends In Need
The city and federal government are teaming up to work on Jamaica Bay together. Note especially this graf: “The new partnership also calls for the creation of a conservancy or friends group dedicated to the bay, to encourage philanthropy. Similar conservancies have helped other large parks in New York City, including Central Park in Manhattan…
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Mud Cells
Two summers ago, a Black and Yellow Mud Dauber wasp built her nest in the Back 40 (inches). A new generation of these large, black-bodied wasps with yellow legs emerged in June of last year. This year I had one inside the house. Not here in Brooklyn, but at the family house in Massachusetts. This…
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Two-Spotted in Brooklyn
One more species of lady beetle spotted in Brooklyn Bridge Park, on the catalpa trees, whose big leaves are sticky with aphid honeydew. This is the Two-Spotted lady beetle (Adalia bipunctata). There were several of them, so there must have been a recent pupation. This species is native to North American and Europe, making it…
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Dog Days
Yesterday, I heard two cicadas whining at the northern end of the Promenade. These were my first of the year. Today I heard one in the back of the apartment, way back, beyond the Back 40 Inches. On a walk through the neighborhood, I spotted a couple of the huge cicada killer wasps (Sphecius speciosus)…
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Banding Osprey, Part II
Osprey chicks can be too old to band, because as they near fledging, they may jump off the nest site prematurely to get away from the human who has climbed up to borrow them for a moment. If they aren’t actually ready to fly, this can lead to broken wings. This one, however, was a…
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The Grossly Ironic Visitor Center
A post in honor of Le quatorze juillet: One might think that conservation and conservatism have much in common, but not in this country, where conservatism is a perverse amalgam of the defense of privilege, corporate oligarchy, talibany fundamentalism, racism, and misplaced class resentment. A U.S. Congressman, with no public input, is attempting to change…
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Banding Osprey, Part I
Last year, there was one fledged Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) chick on the east end of Nantucket. Numbers had been dwindling in previous years and last year was pretty much bottom; there just weren’t any fish to be had, so the adult Osprey were traveling to hunt at the other end of the island, but that…
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Happy Birthday, Henry
To my mind, the exemplar of America is Henry David Thoreau, who was born on this day in 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts. Christened “David Henry,” he changed the order of his given names when he was twenty. He was closely associated with Concord and didn’t sell many books in his lifetime, but his influence as…
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Interior
Underneath the bathroom faucet: a small, pale spider.
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Midge
This landed on my sunglasses recently. I’d never seen anything like it before. A single pair of wings meant it should be in the order Diptera, beyond that I give thanks to Bug Guide for narrowing it down to the non-biting midges of the tribe Chironomini. Note how the forelegs are unsually long, almost like…
Backyard and Beyond 