Fieldnotes
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Bristly midrib
Prickly lettuce, Lactuca scariola, a non-native growing cheek by jowl to the Gowanus on First St.
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Dragonfly Exuviae
Dragonflies seen at Brooklyn Bridge Park these days include the twelve-spotted skimmer, blue dasher, painted skimmer, and variegated meadowhawk. These long exuviae, the shed exoskeleton of dragonfly larvae, belong to one of these, or perhaps another, species. In their larval stage, dragonflies are aquatic, and voracious predators. When ready to make the leap to the…
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Diamondback Terrapins
Yesterday, I was walking along around the West Pond at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge when I came across this diamondback terrapin just beginning to excavate her nest. I was alone, and she might have continued on her single-minded mission, but some other folks walked up and she took to the thickets. (They move faster than…
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JBWR 4th
I couldn’t think of a better way to celebrate Interdependence Day than going out to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge. A warm, foggy morning developed into a hot sunny afternoon.There are three visible osprey platforms at JBWR. One is right on the highway. This one is the closest to the West Pond path. Two of these…
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Prospect Park in the Rain
Lullwater Bridge, sea of duckweed.Gall on witch-hazel Green heron, Butorides virescens, a park nester, and Black-crowned night heron, Nycticorax nycticorax, in the Lullwater.A young cottontail rabbit, Sylvilagus floridanus. Silver spotted skipper, Epargyreus clarus, in the coneflowers behind the Boathouse. In the same pollinator-friendly area, one of the most handsome of hymenoptera, a Golden Northern bumble…
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An Unusual Wildflower
One of the stranger wildflowers of the eastern forests is Conopholis americana, also known as squawroot, American cancer-root, and bearcorn. It looks like a fungus popping up out of the ground. But it’s a plant, and a good reminder that not all wildflowers are, well, wildflowery. This particular flower doesn’t photosynthesize; it lives by parasitizing…
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Three Gowanus Trees
The Valley of the Shadow of the Gowanus, as I like to call it, is the lowland between the ridge of Brooklyn Heights and the Harbor Hill Moraine. The western slope of Park Slope and the eastern slope of Punkiesburg (Cobble Hill) used to drain down into the marshy Gowanus creek, thought to have been…
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Arches
It does us good to remind ourselves that Prospect Park is a synthesis of the natural and the unnatural. The park is a highly engineered production, with drainage tiles laid underneath the Long Meadow, and fire hydrants in the middle of the Midwood, and the old reservoir built into Lookout Hill.Yesterday, the delightful Christopher Gray,…
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The Monarchs Are Here
A male monarch butterfly, Danaus plexippus, in the Battery Bosque yesterdy. You can see some examples of monarch caterpillars in my post from last August. (And you can tell this is a male, even this blurry, because of the small spots in the hindwing veins.) The Bosque, named after the trees that tower over it,…
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Four Sparrow Marsh
Four Sparrow Marsh this early summer day, at low tide. While most everybody else in town was celebrating Gay Pride and the state’s passage of marriage equality (late Friday night, and about time, too), a few of us were being tormented by “mischievous and annoying insects.” I shouldn’t have loaned my head-covering mesh to friends…
Backyard and Beyond 