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 Day in Kestrels

    The male has now been spotted on our fire escape three times. The third time he left this corpse, which he later retrieved. House Sparrow, I think: very grey with a feather of rufous or chestnut. It’s dangerous out there! (Four separate bird corpses are pictured in this sequence.) While the male was on the…

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  • Look What the Wind Blew In

    Eastern Phoebe (Sayornis phoebe). Chipping Sparrow (Spizella passerina).Northern Flicker (Colaptes auratus).Great Blue Heron (Ardea herodias).Palm Warbler (Setophaga palmarum).Green Heron (Butorides virescens). An ornithological note: if you’re like me, you probably learned that few female birds sing. Oops! In about two thirds of songbird species, they actually do. Talk about silencing female voices!

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  • The Snappers Are Restless

    One of the gigantic Chelydra serpentina of Brooklyn.Another? There were at least two big ones in this pond. But note the difference in leech positions. By the way, just look at all the parasitic life-forms latched onto this one’s head and neck! Crowd-sourcing these pictures to Twitter, I found some suggestions that these were Placobdella…

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  • Raptor Wednesday

    The frightful squealing came from behind me as I walked down 34th Street from 5th Avenue. Turning around, I saw two birds flying my way. A larger, darker one was above a smaller, tan or russety one. The tandem went half way down the street and veered to the north, the captured bird still making…

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  • Barks

    Beech and Sassafras running the gamut.A nice-sized Sassafras albidum. They run smaller in the city, where they’re often much newer plantings.And somewhere in the middle zone, Prunus avium, bird or sweet cherry.

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  • Sweet Carolinas

    Carolina Wrens. Thryothorus ludovicianus. Two at the Dell Water. Full-throated.This one was rooting about in a crotch of a tree about six feet up. Yup, that’s mostly raccoon shit.

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  • Kestrel Food

    What is this? He thought it was edible.American Kestrels eat birds, mammals, reptiles, and insects. Saw a picture recently of a male working on a Garter Snake. Some years ago, I became aware of Fence Lizards in the city because of a picture making the rounds of a kestrel flying to a nest with one…

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  • Keeping Up With The Kestrels

    …is exhausting! The distinctive calling of the birds brings us to the windows throughout the day.They seem to be very effective hunters. In the photo above, the male is gripping a dead sparrow. You can just see the sparrow’s little toes. As he usually does, he proceeded to eat the sparrow’s head. Then he plucked…

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  • Young Barnacles

    Barnacle sets. Found on a rock on the rocky glacial shore of Cold Spring Harbor at Sagamore Hill NHS. Barnacles are crustaceans, related to shrimp, crabs, lobsters. Shrimp that have glued their heads onto surfaces and built up walls to stand the siege of low tide… These strange sedentary — at least as adults —…

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  • The Raid

    I heard the raven’s wings. The bird flew right overhead, close enough for me to hear the work of those great wings.This Common Raven returned to this duck nest six times, taking five eggs.The bird wasn’t gone very long after each foray. Presumably the eggs were eaten or cached nearby. The fifth time, the bird…

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