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.”

  • Election Day.

    It’s a pretty clear choice between reaction and moderation today. If you know a nature lover who isn’t planning to vote — like tens of millions of Americans, tragically — perhaps you can convince him or her to go to the polls today? Chances are extremely good that they are not Romney fans. The Romney-Ryan-Rove…

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  • Hung Like a Barnacle

    The Dawn of the Deed: The Prehistoric Origins of Sex, by John A. Long. “We all know about the birds and the bees…” goes the jacket and webpage copy for this book, but do we? In fact, I can’t think of a stranger duo of examples to be used as an euphemism for courtship and…

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  • Wrack, Canis, Kestrel

    From the Brooklyn Bridge, the wrackline is visible on the lawn in Empire Fulton Ferry section of Brooklyn Bridge Park. It’s all over but the clean up in my part of Brooklyn, but Lower Manhattan on the other side of the bridge is still dark.In DUMBO, one of the moss-painted animals left over from the…

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  • A rare personal appearance

    Your blogger, ready to shovel some surge deposits from Brooklyn Bridge Park’s Pier 6, standing on, and in front of — basically in — the greatest city on Planet Earth, with props to London, Paris, and poor old Hoboken underwater across the harbor. Photo by Nate Arnzen. Many dozens of other volunteers were here as…

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  • Dead Flamingo

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  • Trick or Treat Fungus Among Us

    Inexplicably, there will be few fungus costumes today, just as in Halloweens past. And that’s a shame. Fascinating, ubiquitous, vitally important in the plant’s interconnected systems, fungi are a high-level rank of life, a kingdom, up there with plants, animals, and bacteria. It’s important to remember that fungi are not plants, or even much like…

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  • Red Hook

    The Weeping Willow at Van Brunt and King St., an old friend, has come down in the storm. The Red Hook neighborhood, an island at high tide during colonial times, was quite inundated last night and looks miserable today, but not crushed like the Jersey shore or the burned out neighborhoods on the Rockaway peninsula.…

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  • Calm

    Pier One about an hour before high tide. I was somewhat amused to hear someone on the radio say that “high tide would come again.” Yes, it will, roughly every twelve hours, until the moon drifts further away. Meanwhile, the salt marsh perseveres. Squally out there. Very little damage in my neighborhood; largest trees fine,…

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  • Safe and Sound

    Hurricane Sandy gets in your eye. Funky convergence of north-bound hurricane, feeding off hotter than usual ocean (Atlantic temps at 2nd highest record), and south-dipping jet stream pouring in a cold front, plus a full-moon-(last night)-jacked storm surge. The storm is now dumping snow in places. Radical weather aligns/precedes/accompanies radical climate change. Reports of lots…

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  • High Tide

    This was high tide at Brooklyn Bridge Park this morning around 9. This is a 3-foot surge; it is forecast to be nearly double that at the next high tide (9:17 p.m at Brooklyn Bridge). But don’t forget the wind, pushing it even further. The saltmarsh in the right corner is underwater. Salt marshes are…

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