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.”

  • Towhee

    A pair of Eastern Towhees, together inside a thick bush, then separately on the tree above. It’s the City Nature Challenge Weekend.

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  • Naked Branches Budding

    The branches of Kentucky coffeetrees look dead in winter. No buds. Gnarly indecipherable leaf scars. But they are showing signs of life now. Gymnocladus dioicus: the binomial tells you a lot of what you want to know. The genus means “naked branch,” referring to the stark lack of twigs. The species name means the tree…

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  • Hoppers

    The grasses erupt with tiny jumping things. They don’t go far. Finding one isn’t easy because they’re so small. They’re leafhoppers. iNaturalist members say this one is is in genus Dikraneura. And one, even smaller, with no common name, Kosswigianella perusta. Indeed, this wasn’t even a species in the iNaturalist database. Gray Lawn Leafhopper (Exitianus…

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  • Earth Day After

    I was seven in April of 1970. I don’t recall hearing about the first Earth Day. We were living in Canada then. Our modest Toronto suburb was at the extremity of the city line. Two houses down, Bestview (!) Street dead-ended in what seemed like the beginning of the prairie. It’s been developed since, but…

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  • Raptor Wednesday: Earth Day Edition

    In April 1970, at the time of the first Earth Day, there weren’t many Bald Eagles to be found in the Lower 48. Your chance of seeing one over Brooklyn, of all places, was extremely unlikely. Practically fabulous. That they might breed within the city’s limits was an equally outlandish notion. Even before DDT brought…

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  • Pandemic Notes II

    This April has been cooler than March. More rain, too. Or so it seems. The cruelest month? “Breeding/Lilacs out of the dead land” wrote Eliot, ladling out more metaphor than botany from his chilly Modernist citadel. The NYC death toll is now over 13,000. I can’t keep up with the tally. In addition to the…

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  • Orange Pollen

    Little flower, big bee. Long tongue into the nectar, anther against the forehead. This Lamium isn’t letting the bee leave town without some pollen. But wait just a minute. This bee has a white face. The only white-faced bee I know is the male Eastern Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa virginica), but this one was rather too…

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  • Small Birds

    Palm Warbler. Golden-crowned Kinglet. Yellow-rumped Warbler variations. Pine Warbler. Blue-gray Gnatcatcher. Here’s a special one. Yellow-throated Warblers breed to the south of us. So they’re rarer up here, having overshot their migration. Note the lores here. The spaces between the eyes and the bill. That line is white in this case. This makes this one…

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  • Toxicodendron radicans

    There are few finer things in this universe, at least the very small but opulent patch of it that I know, than the gloss of new poison ivy leaves.

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  • Bumble

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