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.”

  • Lifeforms

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  • Warblers, Incoming!

    I spent many years not knowing that every spring three dozen species of wood warblers come streaming up the east coast to gobble up insects on their way to breeding grounds further north. Here’s one of the rarer ones: a Worm-eating Warbler, ridiculously named. This particular one spent a few days in this and neighboring…

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  • Baby Leaves

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  • Birds, Birds, Birds

    “The two forms of antidemocracy feed on each other.“

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  • Kestrels Re-Nest

    Saturday afternoon, painters gentrified the cornice that American Kestrels have used as a nest since 2018. As part of that very rapid work, they closed off the rotted-out old hole up there. On Sunday, we still saw both birds from the window. But Monday morning, ominously, we didn’t have wee colorful falcons perched in the…

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  • Raptor Wednesday: The End of An Era

    From this angle, you can’t see the hole in this cornice very well. You sure can see the whitewash, though. American Kestrel point their tails out and squirt away. Falco sparverius is an unusual North American raptor species in that they nest inside cavities. They usurped some Starlings, no mean usurpers of nesting sites themselves,…

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  • Some Pines

    Setophaga pinus, the Pine Warbler, comes in different flavors.

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  • Birds

    How un-red-breasted this Red-breasted Nuthatch is. A female. Yellow-throated Vireo. I don’t see these every year. Thought it was an another Pine Warbler at first glance with the yellow eye-ring and two white wing bars way up in an oak.

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  • Sunday Extra

    I saw my first Evening Grosbeak in 2012 in Prospect Park. That was a female. This might possibly be the first male I’ve seen. Seen in Green-Wood today. Coccothraustes vespertinus: this binomial could be translated as “kernel-shatterer of the west/evening.” That big beak crushes the opposition (seeds/nuts/kernels). The Latin vespertina means both evening and west.

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  • Claytonia & Co.

    Carol Gracie’s Spring Wildflowers of the Northeast is such a delight to read. Here we learn, for instance, why there can be such color variation in populations of spring beauties (Claytonia virginica), the role of ants in transporting the seeds, and the hundred-plus insects that visit the flowers. “Selective pressures are working at cross-purposes: in…

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