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.”

  • Wigeon And All

    An American Wigeon (Anas americana) and American Black Duck (Anas rubripes). The other day a commentor here bemoaned the intrusion of ideas into his refined quest for pictures of nature. Those who refuse to make the connection between politics and the natural world, or what there is of it, are a monstrous problem. From the beginning…

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  • Yikes!

    Another detail from Audubon’s BoA. I’ve read that JJA had help with the plants in some of his paintings. But what about insects like this one? * Gosh, this is rude. But bracing: the Rude Pundit begs to differ with this notion that we should respect the half-assed, conspiracy-addled, anti-intellectual ignorance of GOP-voting fools.

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  • Raptor Wednesday

    A Cooper’s Hawk on a winter’s day. Here’s Audubon’s rendition. Normally, I find JJ’s birds on the strangely attenuated side, longer and skinnier than they are, probably a result in his pinning up their dead bodies to illustrate them. But I like his capturing of the patterning on the back here very much. Another thing…

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  • Rotten Wood

    Here’s a guide to rebuilding the Democratic Party from the ground up. Those Augean Stables need a power-cleaning.

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  • Fevers

    A couple of the eight Fox Sparrows (Passerella iliaca) I ran into recently. That’s a lot for me. Usually I just seen one or two or a time. These birds nest in the north, that north so radically changing now, in Newfoundland, and upper Quebec, and further west right into Alaska. This is the south…

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  • We Are Petroleum Junkies

    Hydrocarbons are a dog-damned miracle. The things we get out of crude oil, from fuel to explosives, from fertilizers to clothing, from pharmaceuticals to candle wax, from pesticides to plastics, from asphalt to inks… it’s just mind-boggling. Mostly we think of gasoline, but that’s not the half of it. The stuff both powers and rules…

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  • Frozen

    An early form of writing or waterfowl prints in the ice? “Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing…

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  • Larus

    Small and large: Ring-Billed and Herring Gulls, both members of the Larus genus, down at 58th St Pier off the Brooklyn Army Terminal. In case you missed Charles M. Blow’s column on the anti-inauguration celebrations, it’s very much worth reading and acting upon. We plan to protest on the 20th (good practice for the years…

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  • Murals

    In Fort Green. This reminds me that I need to check out the Audubon Mural Project up in Hamilton Heights, near JJA’s old home and burial sites. John Berger has passed away at the age of 90. “Nothing in the nature around us is evil,” he wrote in one of his many essays. “This needs…

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  • Raptor Wednesday

    New Year’s Day dawned with a falcon alighting on top of the antenna perch a long block away. I assumed it was our old friend the male American Kestrel (Falco sparverius) who hangs out there a lot. But it was a Merlin (Falco columbarius), which are not as common here in the city. A Merlin…

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