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Winter caterpillar
Large Yellow Underwing caterpillar. I took this photo on October 15th in Green-Wood and saved it for the first day of winter to illustrate the insect’s life cycle. I thought October was late in the year, but Noctua pronuba can be active even in the dead of winter, given a thaw. The mature caterpillars can…
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Paintings by Zane York
“An oyster speaks to a loaf of bread, an apple to a piece of cloth, a carnation to a clock.” ~ John Berger The French phrase for what we call a still life is nature morte. How else would it stay still long enough to paint? And yet Berger has these inanimate objects in conversation…
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Ivy
A wall of ivy that’s rolled down like a rug ready for storage on a retaining wall of a BQE overpass. Such evergreen thickets are often used by congregations of house sparrows for the night. A host of sparrows is the formal collective noun, but I like congregations because a grouping of sparrows will make…
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December Color
Baldcypress, Taxodium distichum, at Brooklyn Bridge Park. Pop Quiz: The “baldy cypress” is common in its native swamp habitat in the southeastern U.S., and rather less common as a street tree here in NYC. But why, since our streets are only metaphorically swampy — usually — should this species do well here at all? If…
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Autumnal Moths
I am very much looking forward to David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie’s new field guide to moths.
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Museum of Extinct Birds
The Carolina Parakeet, Conuropsis carolinensis, was the only parrot species native to the eastern U.S. It ranged from the Gulf of Mexico to the Ohio River Valley, and as far west as Colorado; it sometimes made it as far north as Ontario. The last wild bird was thought to have been shot in 1904. The…
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Dead Horse Bay in December
Dead Horse Bay, looking north.
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Backyard and Beyond 