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.”

  • Colonial Sea Birds Feeling the Heat

    Warmer oceans=fewer fish=starving birds. This is a report from Alaska, where it’s been a bad year for North Pacific pelagics. Nine years ago when I was Iceland, we went to a famed Atlantic Puffin nesting site. But it had been abandoned since the last time this tour group was there. Some locals we ran into…

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  • Bees &

    Eastern Carpenter Bees “robbing” nectaries. Instead of crawling up into the tubular flowers and getting smeared with pollen, these two are cutting directly to the chase. The facts have come flying in the last week, but this we know: the President of the U.S. has been soliciting foreign states to investigate his political rivals. On…

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  • Butterfly Reprise

    What a year for butterflies! All these were seen in the last two weeks. I’ve now seen 28 species in Kings County, according to iNaturalist. Plus one skipper, oh those bedeviling skippers, only identified to genus level. I meant to post this yesterday, but I screwed up the scheduling. It was 94F on Wednesday and…

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  • Nighthawk Wednesday

    Not quite Raptor Wednesday, but a good excuse to explore the nighthawks. They are not raptors, but their physical similarity in flight to hawks, specifically falcons, at dusk and dawn gives them their name. Perched, they look nothing like raptors. And perched is where you will find them during the day, if you find them.…

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  • Under the Lilac Bush, Again

    Remember the Wasp Lilac? Cicada-killer Wasps and a few other wasp species, but mostly Cicada-killers, were sucking the sap from this one bushy specimen in Green-Wood. Well, more than one lilac, actually, since the one nearby was also being suckled at. A month later, I happened to look again, and now it’s the turn of…

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  • Recent Birds

    Sometimes they are not so close. Great Crested Flycatcher topside. Sometimes the lens make them seem closer than they actually are. Cape May Warbler. And sometimes they practically land right in front of you. Yellow-bellied Sapsucker in molt. More molt. Northern Mockingbird.

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  • The Corporate Killers

    Over and over again, industry has attacked science to further the profitability of… killing. The paradigm is Big Tobacco: cover up your own evidence and fund obfuscation and denial. The oil and gas oligarchy has followed that playbook: they knew about global warming decades ago; they knew pumping carbon into the atmosphere would heat the…

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  • Citrine Observation

    Six years after spotting a male Citrine Forktail at Brooklyn Bridge Park, I spotted one in Green-Wood this week. This is my second record. Ischnura hastata is one the smallest of the damselflies. They like “densely vegetated pond and lake edges, grass seepages, and quiet streams,” according to Ed Lam. The site at Brooklyn Bridge…

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  • And It’s Only Friday

    A water strider. Talk about pressure! Here’s the full whistleblower complaint about Trump’s illegal attempt to get Ukraine to interfere with U.S. elections. He got away with soliciting foreign interference in 2016, so of course he would try again. It goes both ways: at least 12 governments have made payments to Trump properties since he’s…

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  • Untitled

    The latest climate report on the oceans is very grim. Your children’s children will be living — presuming they’re living — in a radically reconfigured world geographically. The coast lines we know will be gone by 2100. We can’t stop the water’s rise, we can only work towards retreating, preparing, and ameliorating. Yet the forces…

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