Backyard and Beyond

Starting out from Brooklyn, an amateur naturalist explores our world.

As John Burroughs said, “The place to observe nature is where you are.”

mthew

  • Azure Bluet

    Other Odonates seen so far in NYC: Common Green Darner, Fragile Forktail, Black Saddlebags, Eastern Forktail, Blue Dasher, Familiar Forktail (tentative ID), Painted Skimmer, and one of the Pantala gliders.

  • Raptor Wednesday

  • Green Beetle Hanger

  • Mammal Monday

    *** This Memorial Day, I’m thinking of my mother’s mother’s older brother, who lies buried in the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery in France. He was an artillery wagoneer, killed just a few weeks before Armistice Day in 1918.

  • Beetlemania

    Beetle-finding partially funded by you… *** “The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily,” wrote Gary Wills after Sandy Hook in 2012. Still heartbreakingly, tragically true, only more so. Firearms are the leading cause of death of American children. This is a savage republic with more guns than people, a nation held…

  • Hunting Billbug

    News: I’ll be a leading a Brooklyn Bird Club insect walk on June 25. Sign up period is 6/19-/6/23, with priority given to BBC members.

  • Mood Board

  • Spiders

  • Raptor Wednesday

  • The Ravens’ Nest

    On January 1st, 2015, I saw two Common Ravens canoodling on an abandoned building down at the waterfront. I’d seen these large corvids in the Hudson Highlands, the Scottish Highlands, and out in the American west before this, and once or twice I’d seen them passing over this borough on the western end of Long…