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.”

  • Dandelions and Co.

    Your donations help support this blog. Addendum: Dandelions are taxonomically complicated. There are around 250 species in Britain & Ireland and rate their own field guide. It seems like non-specialists here in the U.S. have been assuming that all we have are Taraxacum officinale. But Red-seeded, T. erythrospermum, is another possibility. How many others?

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  • Everywhere

    A Red-tailed Hawk slid across the distant sky without any wing motion at all. Closer, much closer: a tiny bird landed in a nearby tree, and, while looking for it (it was a kinglet) I saw a Northern Flicker. The kinglet leaped around the tree, the Flicker was still. Then, glancing down, I saw a…

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  • How About A Little More Pine?

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  • More Arrivals

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  • Raptor Wednesday

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  • Turtle Tuesday

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  • On The Rocks

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  • Caracaras

    The cover of this book grabbed me like a raptor’s talons. This is Georg(e) Forster’s watercolor of a Striated Caracara, a species confined to the Falklands, made during Cook’s second voyage (1772-1775) in search of the southern continent. There are nine other species of caracaras, birds found almost exclusively in South America. There are also…

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  • A Mystery

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  • More Budding, More Blooming

    Reading: a great explanation of bee-washing and its dangers: “multiple negative consequences, including misinformation, misallocation of resources, increasing threats and steering public understanding and environmental policy away from evidence-based decision-making.” The bibliography adds more citations to my collection of resources about the problem of the honeybee.

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