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.”

  • Recent Sightings

    Oh-oh… these are male Wood Duck feathers found under a big pine. Suggesting somebody had duck…. My mother, who was born in Oklahoma and grew up on a farm there until her parents retreated back to the Illinois they’d started from during the Depression/Dust Bowl, didn’t like eating duck. She couldn’t forget the bits of…

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  • Gift Wrapping

    A Baltimore Oriole nest left over from the summer. High up in a linden. So much ribbon! But then, this is a cemetery, and balloons (boo!) and flowers bouquets (inimical to nature in their own way) come tied. The weavers will find their material. In Prospect Park once, I’ve watched an Oriole pecking at some…

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  • Lichens

    Always take a look at the sticks and limbs that come down from old trees. There’s a lot of stuff going on up there, out of sight, and breakages provide a great opportunity to see what. This piece of an oak has at least two nice lichens on it. Star Rosette Lichen (Physcia stellaris). Rosette…

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  • Raptor Wednesday

    This Red-tailed Hawk is “chonk,” as the kids say. The bird took off a few minutes later.

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  • Splotch

    I remember when I went to Montreal some years ago in the fall and saw lots of maples, silver especially, and lots and lots of dark splotches on the leaves. These, however, are examples from right here in Brooklyn. This is Black Tar Spot (Rhytisma acerinum), an ascomycete fungi. It’s cosmetic, not existential.

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  • Perseverance

    Yesterday, with temps in the low 40s and windchill pushing the feel down into the 30s, a tiny ant and a Margined Calligrapher were both working it in a dandelion.

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  • Thryothorus ludovicianus

    Not an atypical look at a wren in typical habitat. Do you see the underside of the Carolina’s tail? Some five minutes’ vigil, however, ended when the bird popped up to the top of the tangle of thicket whose floor they were rummaging in.

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  • Oops

    Insert your action painting jokes here, my friends. This is a dolled-up image of a Red-tailed Hawk poop strike across the hood of a car. …and the original. Big bird, big drop. Probably much more than you want to know about raptor mutes.

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  • Yes, It’s Actually This Orange

    This sure jumps out at you, doesn’t it? Orange Peel Fungus (Aleuria aurantia). A couple of patches had been recorded in Green-Wood by others on iNaturalist and I just had to see it in person. I was not disappointed. With the library, my main source of books, shut down for months and now hard to…

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  • More Cooper’s Hawks

    An Accipter presents a distinctive silhouette. With a longer tail and a narrower body than a Buteo (like a Red-tailed Hawk), they jump out at you. This one allowed me to get on the right side of the sun. Like yesterday’s specimen, this is an adult Cooper’s. (See here and here for a recent immature…

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