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.”

  • 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…

    See more

  • 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…

    See more

  • 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…

    See more

  • Mammal Monday

    The quick and the dead.

    See more

  • 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.…

    See more

    ,

  • We’re Back!

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

    See more

  • 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…

    See more

  • Happy Thanksgiving!

    Next year, we’ll get back to partying and feasting with a festive crowd. This year, we won’t help the virus spread.

    See more

  • Which Plants?

    “A small percentage of plant genera support the majority of Lepidoptera” across the U.S. This new study on keystone species shows that “a small percentage of the plant lineages within a region support larval development in the vast majority of resident Lepidoptera.” “The top 5 genera were Quercus (‘Oaks’), Salix (‘Willows’), Prunus (‘Cherries, Plums, Peaches,…

    See more

  • Pandemic Notes

    Back in April, we noticed the long white trucks parked down at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal. I guessed they were extra refrigerator trucks to be used as temporary morgues for the first surge of COVID-19 after similar trucks were reported at local hospitals. That proved to be correct, unfortunately. The trucks have been there…

    See more