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.”

Backyard

  • Learning from Thoreau

    Henry David Thoreau didn’t particularly like cities, including New York, all that much.  “The pigs in the street are the most respectable part of the population,”he wrote while visiting in 1843.  Thoreau was a country mouse at heart, not a city rat.  He was neither the first nor the last to believe that there was a…