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.”

  • Bottle-brush

    This Eastern Redcedar has mostly been taken over by a vine, possibly poison ivy, but I wasn’t going to get that close to find out.

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  • Blood Memory

    George Boorujy’s solo show Blood Memory opens today at P.P.O.W. Gallery, 535 West 22nd Street, 3rd Floor NY NY (Inner Borough). My earlier post about George.

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  • Skene Amidst the Daffodils

    This is Alexander Johnston Chalmers Skene looking out over the early daffodils in Grand Army Plaza. I assumed that Skene might possibly be the only gynecologist ever memorialized with a statue, but I would be wrong, as you’ll see in that informative Parks Department link: Central Park has J. Marion Simms, the, ahem, “father of…

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  • Staten Island’s Frog

    We interrupt this blog to remind you that while I sometimes range far and wide (Iceland, New Mexico, Nantucket, etc.) my heart remains right here in the great outdoors of the urban conglomeration that is New York City. Nature, as I like to say almost daily, is all around us, even in the city. Case…

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  • Teeth and Nails

    The winter beach is often the last resting place of fish, fowl, and mammal. On my last walk along the north shore of Nantucket, I found a dead Harbor seal (Phoca vitulina). Such close-up encounters, albeit a bit queasy, can offer rare details. For instance, note the the animal’s human-scale teeth: Also, and this was…

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  • Another cache

    Yesterday, we saw a bird’s nest that had been reused as a cache for seeds. Here’s another little hideaway, which was also probably stocked in the fall by one of the several species of mice that inhabit our noctural woodlands. Look inside.

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  • Wind-blown

    These Eastern Redcedars bear the brunt of the wind. But it’s not just some of the highest wind velocities on the east coast, it’s all that deadly salt, too.

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  • Woven Nests

    Probably the most common bird nest come across is the American Robin’s, which is big for a song bird’s, and characteristically made with a mud base and a lining of grasses. Of course, birds don’t want you, or any other predator, to find their nests, so the leafless season is best for discovering them. Of…

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  • American Crow

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  • Prospect Park

    Came across this recently. The thing that struck me on the list was the 300-year old Black Oak on Elephant Hill. That must have been a hell of a tree. I assume it’s the black oak noted as kaput in 1990 by Carsten Glaeser when he updated M.M. Graff’s Notable Tree list of 1972. I’d…

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