Backyard
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Silk Moth
About 11:45 this morning, I noticed some activity at the pupa I found in Prospect Park and brought home to see if it would hatch out. It’s a giant silk moth of some kind, not sure which yet. Above you can see one of the feathery antennae, which has unfurled after being forced out of…
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In the Back 40
The first blossom of my grape tomatoes. Come pollinators! And some kind of leaf miner enjoying the sunflower. Meanwhile, the neighbor’s Japanese knotweed is now a good two feet higher than the fence. Machete time. (TimeOutNY, the consumption [consumptive?] guide to the city, recently pictured the next backyard over from knotweed central.) It’s an evil…
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Field Notes: B&W Warbler
Warbler-mania continues. This is a black and white warbler, Mniotilta varia, one of the most common and easiest to see (and hence photograph). By ear, it’s the omnipresent “weesa weesa weesa weesa weetee weetee wettee” (Sibley’s transliteration) of the woods today. The lack of a black cheek tells me this a female. She has a…
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Worms
Last year, on a night walk in Inwood Park, our guide said that earthworms were slowly transforming, indeed, destroying, our northern hardwood forests. Whoa! I’d never heard that before and wanted to look into it. After all, earthworms are the gardener’s and the composter’s friend, right? Hasn’t that been drummed into our heads for years?…
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Back 40 Lifestyles
Ants in the backyard. Click on this image to get a bigger version. They use the grooves in the concrete as their highway. They take soil particles spilled from my pots to build their little mounds in an otherwise concrete desert. They love it when I place a potted something or other over the grooves.
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Back 40: Spider
Technically, this isn’t out in the back yard (which I call the Back 40), it’s inside, in the bathroom. In fact, there are two of them in there on the ceiling….
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Local critters
Inside, on a wall. Outside in the Back 40, in a pot.
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Another Back 40 Gastropoda
Leopard slug, Limax maximus. This species is native to Europe, but is now found in many other parts of the world. I wasn’t aware until just now that this member of the Gastropoda actually does have a “shell,” only it is internal, underneath the shield, which is that spotted portion at the top front end.…
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Snail tales, part II
They leave a trail of slime and eat your plants, or at least some of them do, but gastropods, with their shells, love darts (!), and hermaphroditism, are as remarkable as any other life-form. (Until you’ve seen slugs mating, my friend, you have not lived. A future post will get sluggy. ) Last autumn, while…
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Snail tales, part I
My Brooklyn backyard is a wall- and fence-enclosed concrete rectangle some 14 by 25 feet in size. A metal balcony and stair overshadowed about one third of the space. Very little sun reaches it during the winter, but come spring it is much less like the bottom of a well. In summer, it’s hot and…
Backyard and Beyond 