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.”

Fieldnotes

  • Butterfly Dependence

    A short walk on the High Line yesterday morning:There were several Red Admirals (Vanessa atalanta); this one was all over the Purple Coneflower (Echinacea).Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus). Not as close to the camera: my first Monarch of the year. On Blazing Star (Liatris spicata).

    mthew

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  • Murre/Guillemot

    Twelve thousand breeding pairs of Common Murres, Uria aalge, known as Guillemots in the UK, nest on Staple Island. Murres eschew nesting material and just use shallow depressions on the rocky surface of such “bird cliffs.” Their eggs are rather more pointy on one end than your typical egg, so that, if nudged or knocked,…

    mthew

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  • Lessons

    1. It’s hard to focus an iPhone in the wind with one hand. 2. Looks like I need a manicure. Although I’ve have never had one, so I probably won’t ever get one. 3. Never believe anybody when they say the city is a sterile wasteland with nothing but pigeons and a surplus of rats.…

    mthew

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  • Farne Islands

    The Farnes are a series of outcroppings of igneous dolerite known locally as the Whinstone Sill starting a mile and and half off of the town of Seahouses, Northumberland. There are 15-20 of them, the ambiguity depending on the tide. Uninhabited except for bird wardens working for the National Trust, the larger rocks in the…

    mthew

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  • Gowanus Twilight

    Yesterday afternoon, I walked over the canal and was surprised by a pair of Kestels cavorting in the air, then two more, flying about. I didn’t have my real camera, so for our post-prandial constitutional we walked down into the valley to see if we could catch the family again. I’d spotted the nest earlier,…

    mthew

  • Puffinmania

    You never forget your first Atlantic Puffin (Fratercula arctica). Mine was, alas, quite dead, a veritable ex-Puffin, gone to join the Choir Invisible. It was being inquisitively pecked at by a Herring Gull on Nantucket’s South Shore. The scavenger was put out and aloft by my approach, and the small dead auk of the family…

    mthew

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  • Representations

    The owl of Minerva overlooking wee Jamie Boswell’s brilliant career. National Portrait Gallery of Scotland.At the kirk in Duddingston, Edinburgh.On the exterior of The Salmon, in Belford. Presumably an earlier incarnation of the inn….In Craster, under the pall of the smokehouse working on the town’s famous kippers (cf. Salmon Rushdie’s first brush with the things).In…

    mthew

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  • Walking Holiday Collage

    This is Arthur’s Seat, a volcanic outcropping turned into a park surrounded by Edinburgh and environs. The sticky toffee pudding at the Sheep’s Heid on the far side was magnificent. I nursed an angry British bee’s sting in the ear over it and a pint.We stayed close to the Royal Botanic Garden and de-jetlagged there.…

    mthew

  • Milkweeds

    While I was away, the milkweeds of Brooklyn all came out. Some of them in Brooklyn Bridge Park are nearly as tall as I am. But here is my favorite, Butterfly Weed, which usually stays pretty close to the ground: Asclepias tuberosa.

    mthew

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  • Lil’ Gators

    The larva of the familiar lady beetle is so different from the adult you have to wonder who it was who first put the two together. Only observation and/or experimental raising would do the trick. I think the one doing the eating here is the Multicolored Asian Lady and the one being eaten is the…

    mthew