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.”

Art Culture Politics

  • Pandemic Notes #3

    Among the 21,138+ Covid-19 deaths in NYC are neighborhood men who ran a local pizza joint and a corner bodega. There are now 96,662+ coronavirus deaths in U.S. under the vicious incompetence of Donald Trump and his grand-old-pary-of-death-enablers. (These are Saturday’s numbers and will be bigger when this is published.) Because the Republican-fascists are waging…

    mthew

  • Earth Day After

    I was seven in April of 1970. I don’t recall hearing about the first Earth Day. We were living in Canada then. Our modest Toronto suburb was at the extremity of the city line. Two houses down, Bestview (!) Street dead-ended in what seemed like the beginning of the prairie. It’s been developed since, but…

    mthew

  • Pandemic Notes II

    This April has been cooler than March. More rain, too. Or so it seems. The cruelest month? “Breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land” wrote Eliot, ladling out more metaphor than botany from his chilly Modernist citadel. The NYC death toll is now over 13,000. I can’t keep up with the tally. In addition to the…

    mthew

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  • Pandemic Notes

    We live on 6th Avenue in Brooklyn, at the top of the Harbor Hill moraine, and look down towards Upper New York Bay. The water begins a block from 1st Avenue. That’s where you’ll find the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal facility stretching north from 39th St. In the last couple of days, some three dozen…

    mthew

  • Eristalis tenax

    An early flying Common Drone Fly (Eristalis tenax). An introduced species. A bee mimic. Their flight season is long, from mid-March to mid-November, but this was the only one seen this day a week ago. *** Spring’s solace is dependent upon the winter, the bright awakening from cold and dormancy, the “green fuse” lit amidst…

    mthew

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  • Cover Art

    Yesterday’s witches’ broom sent me by memory to M. M. Graff’s Tree Trails in Central Park, published in 1970 by the Greensward Foundation. Possibly the first place where I first read about them… maybe in the late 1990s? The Foundation was a precursor to the Central Park Conservancy, back in the bad old days of…

    mthew

  • The Distance That Bounds the Ordinary Range of Vision

    I note the presence of what I call #DailyRaptor on Twitter with as much frequency as I spot raptors out the windows, which is actually quite a lot. Tweets are usually off-the-cuff, and so recently I wrote that a Cooper’s “came into the ken,” followed by one of the local American Kestrel pair, who then…

    mthew

  • Twins

    MACRO: A Planet To Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal “It is clear the political establishment is collapsing in the United States and beyond. Clinging to it makes it possible for reactionaries like Trump to gain more ground the world over and brings climate catastrophe closer. The fundamental issue is this: As the…

    mthew

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  • Oaks to Caterpillars to Birds

    The National Wildlife Foundation has a county-level guide, the Native Plant Finder, to native plants that support caterpillars. Why caterpillars? Because they are esentially the foundation of the food chain for song birds. Even the seedeaters that come to your feeders for seeds and suet in winter feed their young caterpillars. Caterpillars are relatively soft…

    mthew

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  • Homero Gómez González

    At home, the oligarchs poison us slowly, with more shit in the food supply, more sewage in the waterways, more pollution in the air, water, and soil. Trump and his monstrous allies stand for profits over people, very much at the expense of our lives. (Their cultists, the Fascist Fifth of the population, are seemingly…

    mthew

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