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.”

  • The Years Go Marching By

    It’s harder and harder to age in this savage republic. Even as a long-in-the-tooth perpetual adolescent, I’m not in much of a celebratory mood this year, but here are some birthday posts of yore: 2020: bathing beauty. Wait, I did another birthday Red-tailed Hawk in 2019? It fell during Kestrel Week in 2018. 2017: tree…

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  • More Winter Birds

    Yes, please! There was that winter bird count several years ago that tallied only a single Black-capped Chickadee in Kings County, a.k.a. Brooklyn. This winter has been much more chickadee-ee-ee. White-breasted Nuthatches, too, have been plentiful. I love the noises they make. A couple of them quietly chipping with each other; a lone making a…

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  • Corvid ’21

    Days of rain since I took these photos on the weekend. Time’s running out for a haiku about the crows in the snow.

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  • Raptor Wednesday

    Red-tailed Hawk with captured Mourning Dove. It’s hard to imagine these big Buteo‘s catching birds, but they certainly do. Squirrel is also Red-tailed Hawk-able. This particular squirrel lived to chide us all again, but not before dropping a good 15 feet from this tree when the hawk scrambled up after it. The rodent dashed for…

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  • Winter Work

    Water, water everywhere, but most of it frozen solid. The snow under the bird feeders is littered with food. The bare patches, under trees or cleared by the cemetery crew, are scoured. There’s always the road, too, especially under sweet gums. Ground-huggers are suddenly found in the branches, gleaning.

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  • Parrots

    I spotted twenty-nine Monk Parrots yesterday, several blocks from their colony. They were eating the buds of callery pear trees. A lot of the buds were clipped off and fell. The birds descended to the road to eat them.

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  • Winter Woodpeckers

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  • Tongue, Fur, Ivy

    This Red-tailed Hawk was rubbing its bill on this trunk when this photo captured a bit of hawk-tongue hanging out. Nearby, a squirrel was being very quite in a thicket of poison ivy that extends off this pine like so much witchy hair.

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  • Redpolls!

    A half-dozen tiny-billed Common Redpolls energetically flitted all over this American sweetgum the other day in Green-Wood. Not much bigger than the sweetgum pods themselves, the birds needled out the tiny seeds within. I haven’t seen one of these boreal finches in many a year. With the light and the pond, over which this sweetgum…

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  • When Pine Siskins Attack

    Look out, sweetgum balls!

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