mthew
-
Sweet Bees
Sweat bees in the family Halictidae are attracted to the salt in sweat. This little one would not be put off from my arm. Blown and shook off, it returned several times. I have no problem offering up extruded salts, but I was slathered in sunscreen, and that can’t be good for anything, even when…
-
Mouse of Walden
“Someone memorialized Thoreau’s small friend by drawing a mouse on the the back of his door,” writes Laura Dassow Walls in her magnificent new biography. In honor of the Thoreau bicentennial and the mouse at Walden Pond, I asked my friend Marion to draw one on the door to my apartment. Meanwhile, in Antarctica: Larsen…
-
HDT200
Born two hundred years ago today, David Henry Thoreau entered the world some 182 years after Concord was settled by English colonialists. What a half-way point for America! Concord’s establishment was, by the way, half a dozen years after the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony: the Puritans were reluctant to move inland. At first.…
-
Birthday Boy
Tomorrow is Henry David Thoreau’s 200th birthday. This was his journal entry of March 23, 1856: “I spend a considerable portion of my time observing the habits of the wild animals, my brute neighbors. By their various movements and migrations they fetch the year about to me. Very significant are the flight of geese and…
-
A Week on the Thoreauvian Rivers
“The Indian pipe is still pushing up,” noted Henry David Thoreau in his journal on August 23, 1858. The ghost plant, indian pipe, Emily Dickinson’s favorite flower: Monotropa uniflora emerging. Often mistaken for fungi, this is actually a heterotrophic flowering plant. There are several thousand species of such non-photosynthesizing plants in the world. Most of…
-
Purple Martins
It’s been several years since I last ventured to the Purple Martin colony at Lemon Creek on Staten Island. There are at least half a dozen nests going now. It’s hard to count with all the comings and goings. Also, House Sparrows and European Starlings have taken some of the spaces, adding to the difficulty…
-
Tetraopes tetrophthalmus
Red Milkweed Beetles, not to be confused with the milkweed bugs (Oncopeltus), don’t seem to be bothered by the toxic sap of milkweeds (Asclepius). In fact, like the more famous Monarch butterfly, their bold coloring serves as a warning they they taste like… yeech!… milkweed. (Here’s more on this fascinating topic.)As you might guess from…
-
-
The Buzz
For a number of plants, including such delicious Solanaceae (nightshades) as tomatoes, potatoes, tomatillos, eggplant, and peppers, the frequency of a bumblebee’s buzzing is what releases pollen. The bumble grabs ahold of the anthers and vibrates the pollen loose. Honeybees, who get more credit they they deserve, don’t do this; they pick up exposed pollen, but…
-
Raptor Wednesday
A Northern Mockingbird buzzing the apex of this church on 4th Avenue and 8th Street made me glad we were at a stoplight. And had a “raptor roof” (what I believe is known to the trade as a moonroof). For there was an American Kestrel up there. At the end of June, I had a…
Backyard and Beyond 