Fieldnotes
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Look around
It is a truth universally acknowledged that I don’t have the camera & lenses for great bird photography. (You can find plenty of far better shots on the web). But one of the reasons I do this blog is to convey the message that everyone, anyone, can be an observer of wildness. Fancy gear is…
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Fort Tilden Stars
At the western-most parking lot at Fort Tilden, we came across a pile of treasures of suspicious provenance. There were perfectly intact shells of both our big whelk species, moon snails (including the largest I’ve ever seen), and lots of sea stars. I’ve never found a sea star on the beach around here, and usually…
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Clinton Street Blossoms
The magnolias are starting to bloom, and this year, perhaps under the influence of the Japanese films I’ve been watching at Film Forum, I’m finding them a bit too rich for my blood. The ripe fleshiness is more blowsy than sensual. And the ghostly white ones nod towards the terrors of the “Whiteness of the…
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Rockaway
Friends who live in the Rockaways showed us around last week. This barrier beach of a peninsula juts out of the soft underbelly of Queens as the sheltering arm of Jamaica Bay. It’s thickly settled on its eastern end, but Jacob Riis Beach and the Fort Tilden section of Gateway NRA provide some naturalist splendor.…
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Brooklyn Woodchuck
I’m bringing this out of the archives in case anybody ends up here from a nice article in the Times by Jesse Greenspan on city groundhogs/woodchucks, in which I am quoted.Through the urban naturalist grapevine, I knew that woodchucks lived in Green-Wood Cemetery, but I’d never run across one before. Yesterday, I noticed something oddly…
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On State St.
There’s still a dearth of nectar & pollen bearing flowers, but a small plot of fancy tulips was being worked over by some bees Saturday. I’ve recently checked in with both the feral honey bee nests I know of in Brooklyn, and both show no signs of activity. I hope it’s just the cold.Further down…
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Cattails on high
I was walking down Furman Street, which parallels the new Brooklyn Bridge Park and is half shadowed by the howl of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Passing one of the few buildings left from the days of dockland glory, I looked up. (The building is a garage on the 1929 map, between the old Ward Line and…
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Mourning Cloak
One of the earliest butterflies of spring, the mourning cloak, Nymphalis antiopa. Appropriately enough for its mournful name, this one was photographed today in Green-Wood Cemetery.
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Mushroom season
The early days of spring, with their rain and damp, are good for mushrooms. These fruiting bodies of fungi grow quite quickly when conditions are right. This one was peaking out of the leaf-litter in Prospect Park over the weekend. I’m pretty clueless on identifying mushrooms, but I think it’s a polypore of some kind.…
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Beach CSI
A beach is an inhospitable place. The wind turns sand into a blasting medium. The sea means a high level of salt, which is antagonistic to much life. In summer, the sand’s heat makes you jump. If you look closely, you’ll see invertebrates adapted to this harsh environment; there’s all sorts of life underground, especially…
Backyard and Beyond 