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.”

  • Grain of the universe

    The Rings of Saturn? No, the benches and tables at newly opened Pier 5 at Brooklyn Bridge Park.Like elsewhere in the park, this is recycled Southern Longleaf Yellow Pine (Pinus palustris), which was salvaged from the former Cold Storage Building at Pier One. This species has the highest resin content of any pine, perhaps because…

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  • Feedback is Hell

    “The undiscovered polar regions are the home of men.” Henry David Thoreau, December 16, 1850. One day in the not-so-distant future, the imaginative hold of the Polar regions will be largely history, melted away into dreams. Zones of purity and terror, the once mysterious Poles obsessed peoples for centuries. Emily Dickinson, for one. She called…

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  • Books

    make the best gifts. For the natural history nerds on your list, here are all the books I’ve noted on this blog. And these are my four my most recent reviews if you want to jump ahead: Once and Future Giants by Sharon Levy The Dawn of the Deed by John A. Long Bird Sense…

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  • Spectacular ducks

    Hooded mergansers (Lophodytes cucullatus), female above, male below. The male’s wild crest is lowered in this shot, the female’s cinnamon-colored one mostly upright. These birds were in Central Park’s Jackie O Reservoir, where I understand they like to hunt for crayfish. Mergansers — there are two other species in our parts — have serrated bills,…

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  • Beach Things

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  • Counting Crows and Others

    Today’s the start of the annual Christmas Bird Count. This tradition started 113 years ago as a protest against the then popular Christmas Hunts, in which pretty much everything that flew was targeted to be blown out of the sky. A change for the better, I think. The counts go on for the next few…

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  • Red Robins

    Not all of our American Robins live up to their species name, Turdus migratorius. They will stick around through the winter as long as there is available food and water. Nearly a dozen were scouring berries from this tree the other day. They’ll eat hawthorne, dogwood, chokecherries, and sumac berries, among others, and are said…

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  • December moth

    A mild night, and the outside light brought in these moths. The flash overexposed this one, creating the ghosts on the double paned sliding door.Not enough light on this one, but check out the barbs on the rear set of legs. It was unusually warm last week, in the last month of what has turned…

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  • A bird in the mail

    is worth two in the bins. This came by… air mail today. Thank you, K.

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  • Gray, with red highlights

    It was as gray a Ring-billed Gull yesterday.But in Brooklyn Bridge Park, if you looked closely, there were flashes of color.Subtle color, mostly.But in a few cases, as in these rose hips, vibrant, almost lurid in comparison.And speaking of lurid, these seem to have been devoured from within.

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