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.”

  • 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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  • Raptor Wednesday

    Blue Jays and Nuthatches are a reliable source of alarm when a Cooper’s is in the hood. This one was out in the open with prey when I followed the shrieks, but soon retreated to the foliage of a beech. The raptor was plucking. A few of the prey’s feathers fell down to the road…

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  • Pods

    Juncos and Goldfinches eating the tiny seeds of the sweetgum tree. All over the ground under several old trees. In hand with one of the pods. And now for something relatively different: Kentucky coffeetree pods. So named because these seeds were once turned into an ersatz coffee. Before that, did some extinct megafauna crunch these…

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  • Mammal Monday

    The quick and the dead.

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  • Just Batty

    A Green-Wood gardener called my attention to two Eastern Red Bats hanging from maple leaves in the cemetery last week. These were at eye level. Who knows what was further up…. Looking like old leaves or rotten fruit/cones, this is their day camouflage. I’ve seen the occasional bat in flight in Brooklyn over the years.…

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  • We’re Back!

    Nature blogging is hard work. We’ll be back to regularly scheduled narrowcasting on the ‘morrow.

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  • T-Day and Counting

    I am struck by the case of the now notorious Maine wedding, whose participants took the pandemic to a rural town and killed at least seven people. None of the murdered victims were at the wedding — the insidiousness of a virus is that it spreads beyond one’s kin and ken. Long term care worker’s…

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