Fieldnotes
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BBG
It was warm and gray in the Brooklyn Botanical Garden this morning. I saw my first chipmunk of the year, woken from its dozing, its racing stripes flashing. The Pond is still frozen over, so the turtles yet dream their turtle dreams in the mud.Catkins of the Caucasian alder, Alnus subcordata, native to Iran. Is…
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Public Scope
UPDATE 3-11-11 State Senator Carl Kruger, whose district includes Four Sparrow Marsh, has been indicted. About time. According to today’s Daily News, it’s alleged that Kruger’s “no big box stores” demand at the meeting detailed below supported his developer buddy Aaron Malinsky (who has paid Kruger’s shell operation $472,500 in the past), who wants smaller…
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Coney Island Creeky
Coney Island is no longer an island and it is no longer full of what the Dutch called konijn, or, as the English would say, conies — that is, rabbits. Coney Island Creek, which cuts into the western end of the neighborhood, is all that remains of the watery border between the erstwhile island and…
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East Pond in Winter
Gray birch, a.k.a. white birch, Betula populifolia. A closer look at that birch bark. Big John’s Pond. The Raunt. Towering common reed, or phragmites. American crow overhead.
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Just ducks, ducky
The other day I was actually heard to express some weariness with winter. Even me. Mostly, I’m just tired of putting on and taking off my boots, putting on and taking off my boots. A surefire antidote to the winter ice blues, though, is to go looking for waterfowl. These fat-swaddled birds let the cold…
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Three hour harbor tour
Thalatta, thalatta! cried Xenophon’s Greeks when, after a long struggle, they finally saw the Black Sea again. (In modern Greek, it’s thalasssa, thalassa, the sea, the sea!) I often think of this rejoicing when I see the water. Like the Aegean, another cradle of civilizations, New York City is an archipelago, with almost all of…
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Cardinals
I’m betting that an awful lot of people who say they don’t know their birds can recognize the cardinals. The Northern Cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis, is one of our most distinctive year-around birds. They are particularly obvious in winter, when the red male sticks out like a tropical flower in the snow. The female, although less…
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Wild Urban Plants
Let us now praise infamous weeds. “It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how”… it got that way. Well, as early as 1672, a couple dozen European plants were already growing spontaneously in New England… Today, there are Paulownia trees growing on both ends of the Union Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal.…
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Winter Trio
The winter beach can be an unforgiving landscape, scraped by the wind and beaten by the waves. There are almost always dead sea birds to be found washed ashore. This red-breasted merganser was on its way to being thoroughly recycled. Note the serrated jaws here, a characteristic of the species notably lacking in the loons.…
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Winter II
Maybe it was my peripatetic upbringing, but I didn’t know until fairly recently that trees carry their buds all through winter. I just assumed they appeared right before they opened up as the days grew longer and temperatures rose in the spring. This was another instance of my not actually seeing while I was looking.…
Backyard and Beyond 