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.”

  • Darth Vader

    Found this under a bed recently. Where, ahem, it had not been cleaned in a while.

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  • The long and winding beach

    The low winter sun made the vegetation capping the cliff cast long shadows of late Matisse dancers. Calendars mean less than they used to, though: it was in the mid-60s, and there were fresh prints of bare feet in the sand, sign of a freer spirit than I.On the left, a male Bufflehead (Bucephala albeola),…

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  • Street Leaves

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  • Where have all the Megafauna gone?

    Long time passing. Sharon Levy’s Once and Future Giants: What Ice Age Extinctions Tell Us About The Fate of Earth’s Largest Animals is hard to put down. It’s sort of a Pleistocene CSI: 13,000 years later, scientists are trying to put together the pieces of what happened to the large animals of North America. These…

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  • Owls Real and Artistic

    Brooklyn’s owls aren’t just wheat-paste works, but this piece of art is certainly easier to see. On Hall St. in Clinton Hill. Anybody know the artist? An injured Saw-whet was found in Sea Gate last month and taken to the bird hospital. And this fledgling Great Horned Owl (Bubo virginianus), one of two known to…

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  • Ten Thousand Trees

    New York City lost ten thousand trees in the great storm. Many other trees had limbs torn asunder, like the one pictured above, whip-snapped by the fierce winds. By now, the streets and parks have largely, but not completely, been cleared of this wreckage, but the gaps will be around for a long time, in…

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  • Fahnestock

    Clarence Fahnestock Memorial State Park is in Putnam County and rather inaccessible to us public transport types. But a friend who lives nearby joined us and we HOVed there to explore a tiny bit of the 16,000 acre park, walking around Pelton Pond. This was originally man-made and then CCC-improved, and except for the strange…

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  • Timecast

    Nobuho Nagasawa’s Timecast, in the sidewalk of Columbia St.

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  • Digestif

    I recently reread Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, in a new annotated edition from The Belknap Press of Harvard. This reprints the original 1818 edition, with samples from the 1831 edition, and MWS’s introduction to that later version. In this intro, she tells the famous genesis of the story, reaching back to…

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  • Evening Grosbeak

    A female Evening Grosbeak (Coccothraustes vespertinus) making a rare appearance in Prospect Park. It has been around for a few days. This was this morning at 10:30. The last recorded sighting of this species was a dozen years ago, and before that, 1989. On the right is another member of the finch family, a Pine…

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