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.”

  • Breakout!

    Looks like we’ll be just to the west of hurricane Henri today unless it veers our way. Hatches are battened. Hope you’re all safe. Here’s the passing plate….

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  • Sunflower Pollen Power

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  • Got Galls?

    Phylloteras poculum, no common name, is a tiny gall wasp. They lay their eggs on a white oak leaf, and the tree responds by building this structure, which envelops the egg. The larva inside is protected from the elements, including, to a certain extent, predators, and has plant material to eat in there.

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  • SLF

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  • Raptor Wednesday

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  • Dazed

    The paralyzed prey will be dragged underground. The wasp will lay an egg on it. Once hatched, the wasp larva will have an enormous meal to eat before pupating into… an adult wasp who will emerge next year to go hunting cicadas. After yesterday’s post, a friend sent me this quote from Thoreau’s journal from…

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  • Dog Daze

    An annual dog day Neotibicen cicada. Not to be confused with: A periodical Magicicada cicada, like this one from Princeton during this spring’s Brood X emergence. These annual cicadas are seen every year, but “annual” is a bit deceiving. The dog day cicadas spend several years underground sucking on tree roots, just like the periodical…

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  • Trypoxylon politum

    If you look under eaves, bridges, tunnels, and, in Green-Wood, around the nooks and crannies of mausoleums, you might very well find some of these mud tubes. After all this construction work, the female Organ-pipe Mud-dauber hunts for spiders, which she paralyzes and stuffs into chambers within each tube. Each chamber gets an egg. The…

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  • Leaf-cutters

    Megachile genus leaf-cutter bees cut out circles of leaves to line their nests. Another characteristic of this huge genus is that they carry pollen on the underside of their abdomen. So that glow you see is actually pollen in the hairs. Honey bees, bumble bees, and other bee species typically pack it around their hind…

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  • Three Fledglings Continue

    Nine days between sighting a trio of Green Heron fledglings in Green-Wood Cemetery and then re-seeing of all three of them together again. In between, there were a few days of seeing two of the fledglings at the same time. A fraught time that was! Did one not make it? But they’re still a triumvirate,…

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