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.”

  • American Chestnut

    Being an arboretum as well as a cemetery, Green-Wood hosts a few American Chestnuts. This gives one the opportunity of glimpsing what was once one of the great trees of eastern North America. Castanea dentata was wiped out by the chestnut blight starting a little over a century ago. You can still find stumps that…

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  • Orange Bluet

    Hard to get damselflies in focus at this scale and angle. I usually get the face and thorax crisply focused. But here, the distinctive 9th segment, all orange, comes through the sharpest. There are ten abdominal segments on a damselfly, and patterning on them can be key to identification.

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  • The Eyes Have It

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  • Meanwhile, in Pollination:

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  • Raptor Wednesday

    Saturday morning, there was movement inside the American Kestrel cavity. I could see two nestlings. On Sunday morning, they could see me. Two females and a male. Very possibly more in this spacious rust-bucket of a cornice. To re-cap: for three seasons, American Kestrels bred on the corner above the Valentina bodega. This spring, that…

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  • The Young Ones

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  • Mammal Monday

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  • Pollinator Week

    New readers/viewers: did you know we accept donations to help defray the cost of hosting this blog?

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  • Odonata Update

    Today’s the start of the Odolympics, an attempt to survey the dragonfly and damselfly populations of the Western Hemisphere. (Part 2 will take place in December for folks in South America.)

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  • Youngsters

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