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 Return of Monarchy

    Saw my first Monarch Butterfly yesterday. A male. Nectaring on milkweed in Green-Wood.

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  • Nectar “Robbing”

    Bee species can be divided up by tongue-size. The Eastern Carpenter Bee, pictured here, is one of our largest bees. But it doesn’t have a big tongue to go with that body size. They’re considered a medium-tongued species. They can’t reach into long flowers. So they cut holes at the base of these flowers. And…

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  • Ubiquitous

    Harmonia axyridis is found everywhere now. Mugwort is a good place to find them. This is a vary variable beetle, variably spotted, even variably colored (although the red ones predominate). They are rounder and larger, in general, than native species. Introduced to North America about a century ago, they are invasive, bad news for native…

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  • Small World

    Linden Bark Borer Moth on a linden leaf. An introduced species… to go with our numerous introduced linden species. Linden’s are very popular street trees here. The flowers are just opening now. European Paper Wasp, the one with the orange antennae. One of the tiger crane flies. Certain grassy and unkept parts of Green-Wood are…

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  • Raptor Wednesday

    Mamma Kestrel after a recent rain.

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  • Keep Looking

    An unkempt clump of spirea and other plants. Just watch for a bit. Things are happening. You just need to tune your senses to it.

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  • Male Flowers

    Some trees species have both male and female reproductive parts on the same tree. Others, called dioecious, have male and female parts separated on individual trees. Kentucky coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus) is one of these species. This is even signified in the species epithet. These are the flowers of a male Kentucky coffeetree.

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  • Black Lives Matter

    The very fact that it has to be said, for years, for decades, for fucking centuries. The very fact that some whites shriek “all lives matter” in response, as they also demand the right to risk infecting the people who do their hair, and miss the point entirely. It’s hard to put together a post…

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  • Haiku

    A calling raven passes swiftly overhead ~ Where was I going?

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  • Real Bees

    The Common Eastern Bumblebee is, as the name suggests, our default bumblebee species. Bombus impatiens is found throughout the east-of-Mississippi River region, from FL to NS. Bumble Bees of North America by Williams, Throp, Richardson, & Colla, lists only five color pattern forms (two queen, one worker, two male) for this species. That’s not a…

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