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Sun Print/Blue Print
Yesterday’s lacy skeletonized leaf was so popular it sent me back into my chaos files to find this sun print or cyanotype I made of a leaf skeleton years ago. This particular leaf was 8″ long from tip to petiole end, so you should click on this image to make it fill your screen at…
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Sky, Osprey
The big sky at the edge of Brooklyn: Salt Marsh Nature Center at Marine Park.White Island, a work in progress, in the background. In yesterday’s strong wind, a lone Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) swept by several times, examining one of the nesting platforms. This bird probably very recently arrived from its South American “winter” home. A…
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Waterfowl
A female Red-breasted Merganser (Mergus serrator) mixes Punk feathers with Goth eyes.A pair of these ducks were hanging out around Pier 5 the other day. Constant diving did not seem to plaster those stiff head feathers down for long.A Red-throated loon (Gavia stellata) was preening between Pier 5 and the ruins of Pier 4.The throat…
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Saw Whet
Of all the many services provided here at Backyard & Beyond, bird identification tops the list. Want to know what kind of owl that is in your backyard? You could look it up, of course, like my friend Zina Saunders did when she saw an owl outside her window. This was in the air/light shaft…
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Springing/Budding
Sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) bud emerging. Today marks the vernal or spring equinox, when the hours of day and night are exactly 12 hours each — except that they are not. But you can take that up with your local astronomer if you’d like. Otherwise, enjoy the eruption of life here in the northern hemisphere in…
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Shroom
One of the polypore mushroom species, aging nicely in Prospect Park.
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Prison Peregrine
I only recently discovered that Peregrine falcons nested on the high-rise Brooklyn Detention Complex on Atlantic Avenue last year. This building used to be called the Brooklyn House of Correction ~ things becomes more complex but not necessarily better ~ although it is neither a house nor particularly corrective. I’m not often near it, even…
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We stand
on the wings of eagles.High about the columns at Grand Army Plaza, symbolic eagles provide a perch for even mightier real pigeons. These columns, with their pre-fascist fasces, were designed by Sanford White, whose post-Olmsted and Vaux entrance-way brought the rustic Victorian park into the grandiose Victorian end of the century (1892). Brooklyn-born Frederick MacMonnies,…
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