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.”

  • Hope is a Thing With Feathers?

    Do Baltimore Orioles hope to find the material necessary to build their woven nests? I think not. They’d probably be extinct if they did. Instead they do: they seek out dried grasses and rushes and other fibers. In this world, they also find string, rope, ribbon, and bits of this and that to be useful.…

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  • Nature Morte

    Check out Zane York’s Nature Morte at The Arsenal Gallery, The Arsenal, Central Park, NY NY, through April 27. We can chortle all we want to at the French, a la Groening’s Law — if I remember my graduate school days correctly — the French are funny, sex is funny, and comedy, obviously, is funny,…

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  • Great Blue & the Democracy of the Heart

    Lo and behold, on a recent day I scanned the little islet in the midst of the Sylvan Water and found this Great Blue Heron. Had the bird stuck around all winter? (We’ve have very few days with frozen water). I did see a GBH sail across the Sunset Park plain back in January, heading…

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  • Thoreau Thursday

    Yesterday in Prospect, the rites of spring were springing. An astonishing twenty-six Wood Ducks were to be found on the Pools. Chipmunks and turtles were out and about in the unseasonable warmth. Behold, two European Goldfinches, far from home. The first Mourning Cloak of the year, velvet over the sere leaves. A pair of male…

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  • A Day Without Women

    The Gentlemen’s Auxiliary will be wearing red today in solidarity with the women’s strike.

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  • Books of a Feather

    I grew up with Roger Tory Peterson’s field guide in the house. I was not a bird watcher then (“birder” with its exciting, action-orientated flavor, had not yet taken over the lingo). My mother was. I didn’t get it. I could definitely identify a Northern Cardinal. When I started to watch birds I decided to…

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  • Pod

    Variation on a Kentucky Coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus) pod. “Listen to them! The children of the night. What music they make.” Ok, Bela Lugosi’s Count D is talking about the Transylvanian wolves, but Brooklyn has some interesting early spring night musicians, too. Join me on a Brooklyn Brainery expedition to the edges of the borough to…

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  • Oak Galls

    The mighty oaks and their galls are an endless source of curiosity. This particular type, a hard, fruit-like structure, is created by a tiny wasp, which essentially irritated the tree into making them for their larva. Clever boots! The trees are Swamp White Oak (Q. bicolor), according to the Street Tree Map. (I’m waiting on…

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  • Of a feather

    Have you been keeping up with the our ever-expanding knowledge of bird evolution? The linked summary is a good place to catch up on these fascinating discoveries and hypotheses. The findings have been, uh… flying off the fossil beds in recent years and they have turned over old certainties. The barred pattern on the feather…

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  • Anniversary

    On this date in 2010, I launched this blog with this post. I would like to be less polemical on this anniversary, but the times are very much out of joint. It’s all-hands on deck against the multi-pronged radical Republican assault against our liberties. Back in 2010, the terrible manifestations of racism and nationalism that…

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