Backyard
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Bird Week
This is Bird Week at the New York Times’ City Room. If you’ve found my blog by way of their recommendation, welcome! Please consider subscribing for the freshly baked, ad-free, posts of tomorrow and the days ahead. In the meantime, get out there and watch the birds. You can start on the streets, where house…
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Shhhh
We are out listening to the heartbeat of paradise this morning. When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see you’re related to everything else alive on this finite planet? Do you see that you are essentially solar powered? Do you see how you exist because of the waste product of…
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BK 4BR Park Vue Fully Stocked
The Nethermead Arches is a great place for wasp condos. The bridge provides protection from the sun and rain, so organpipe mud-dauber wasps, Trypoxylon politum, build their nests upon its vertical surfaces. Each tube here is made up of several separate cells. An egg was laid in each cell with a cache of paralyzed spiders…
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Not at all sluggish
I know you’ve all been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the first slug of the year in the Back 40, my concrete backyard. Well, here it is. (There were probably others, but as mostly nocturnal creatures, they’re hard to see.) The leopard slug, Limax maximus, slime-delivered. Disliked by gardeners, for they eat greens; loved by…
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Meet a beetle
Ah, spring, when a nature nerd’s fancy turns to whatever is found crawling on the inside door frame. This is a varied carpet beetle, Anthrenus verbasci. It is one itty-bitty member of the mighty beetle order, being a hair under 1/8″ long. It was devilishly tricky to shoot, with the macro feature and a 15x21mm…
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Albedo in Brooklyn
The backyard light was on the other night and the light bounced back brightly into my apartment because of all the snow. Ah, I thought, albedo in action. Technically, albedo is a “ratio of reflected radiation from the surface to incident radiation upon it” (Wikipedia). Crossword fiends and Catholics will recognize the alb in the…
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Mud daubing neighbors
The Back 40, my tiny backyard, is dominated by the overhang of the balconies the upstairs neighbors enjoy. Rusting I-beams support this addition to the building. I recently glanced up and found that one of the beams supports something else entirely. Thanks to the good people at Bug Guide, I can tell you that this…
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Another interior denizen
I’ve seen these around the apartment a couple of times. This one I found in the tub. Naturally, I was curious… This is a spider beetle, a member of the family Ptinidae; there are about 50 species in the U.S., mostly in the Southwest. But wait, a spider beetle? Does that compute? Spiders, you’ll remember,…
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PlanNatureNYC
I hope you don’t need convincing that New York City is full of wildness. And a good thing too, for Thoreau summarized our vital need for the wild when he said that “in wildness is the salvation of the world.” His “wildness” is usually mis-remembered as “wilderness,” but no, he wasn’t talking about the far…
Backyard and Beyond 