Fieldnotes
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“Why are there so many dragonflies in prospect park this year?” asks a Googler. Are there? Populations rise and fall through the years, depending on weather, food supplies (adult dragonflies eat other insects), disease ~ the usual ebb and flow of expansion and contraction amid animal and plant populations. (Only we humans have managed to…
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Hairy Larva
As much as we love the great outdoors here at Backyard and Beyond, we don’t neglect the mysteries of the interior. Wildness is also here, inside, with us and amongst us.A tiny larval something or other in the bathroom, using the edge of the tiled wall as its path. I could not help but think…
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Nuts! Conkers
The Horse-chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum, a native of Eurasia, is a relatively common tree in the city, having long been a popular ornamental. This is its seed, or conker. The Yellow Buckeye, Aesculus flava, meanwhile, is a native of the Ohio River valley and other Appalachian valleys, and is seen much less frequently in the city.…
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Nuts! Beechnuts
General Anthony C. McAuliffe Week continues….We have two kinds of beech trees, genus Fagus, in our midst: the European F. sylvatica and the American F. grandifloria, with numerous cultivars, including cut-leaf and copper, and several subspecies to mix it up even further. Sylvatica was often planted in parks, where the smooth gray bark attracts the…
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Waiting for me in the warmth of the hallway.I plead self-defense.
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Nuts! Acorns
We’re going nuts this week to celebrate summer’s ferocious growth spurt, which channels energy into storage systems we call seeds and/or nuts. Botanically, true nuts are produced by, among others, oak, beech, chestnut — but not horse-chestnut — alder, hazel, and hornbeam species, but we’ll be a little looser here, since any one of the…
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Osage Orange
“Don’t sit under the Osage Orange with anybody else but me.” Maclura pomifera, a.k.a. bois d’arc, bodark, hedge-apple. There are several in Prospect Park, but this one in the Nethermead is the park’s finest example. It should be dropping its cargo of softball-sized fruits any second now. Folk belief has these “apples” used to scare…
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Prospect Park: A Study in Green
Earlier today at the Binnen Water. You can de-Impressionism this by clicking on it to open it to a larger size.
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Orbweaver Requiem
I returned to the house Sunday afternoon to find Saturday’s spider on the floor. A single silk line connected my desk chair to the desk. Brooklyn Invertebrate CSI: The rear of the abdomen looks deflated, while the front is grotesquely distended. Parasite? Disease?
Backyard and Beyond 