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.”

  • Mont Royal

    A big lump of magma long exposed to erosion, Mont Royal rises above the island of Montreal. A good place for a park, no? Frederick Law Olmsted — who I inevitably call Frederick Lawn Olmsted, with a nod to James Joyce’s “Lawn Tennyson, gentleman poet” — evidently thought so, too. After the triumphs of Central…

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  • Three for Thanksgiving

    A trio of things found in a southeastern New Hampshire garden this summer by our Thanksgiving dinner host. Burying beetle, Nicrophorus orbicollis. Gray lancetooth snail, Haplotrema concavum (I think). Six-spotted tiger beetle, Cicindela sexguttata. Let’s take a closer look at the latter:The elytra are parted to reveal the underwings.

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  • Beetlemania

    A collection of beetles at the Insectarium de Montreal which I visited earlier this month. This picture was shot through the vitrine glass. There are 350,000-400,000 described species of beetles; estimates suggest there may be a million or more species of them all told. These are just some of the most spectacular and shiny ones…

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  • Maple Leaf Wow

    Among the remarkable artifacts found with the “Iceman” in northern Italy in 1991 was this maple leaf. It is 5,300 years old. The man used it to wrap and preserve the embers of his fires. Like the rest of his gear, and himself, it was freeze-dried on the mountain where he was murdered (ah, humanity!).…

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  • Downy parachute

    This is the seed of a milkweed, several different species of which are found in Brooklyn Bridge Park. According to this site, it’s a parachute seed, one of seven different wind-dispersal types.A framed version that I found down the block. Looks homemade, using the same techniques my old stained glass artist of a roommate used.…

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  • Avian Builders

    Avian Architecture: How Birds Design, Engineer, and Build by (the puckishly named) Peter Goodfellow. So what don’t birds build their nests out of? Most of us are probably familiar with the grassy/twiggy cup nests built by a number of songbirds, some lined with moss, some reinforced with mud, like the classic, omnipresent American Robin nest.…

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  • Navy Yard

    The human/nature… intersection? continuum? state-of-being? Whatever you want to call, it certainly is. What it means here on this blog is that I always keep a weather-eye out for manifestations when I’m up to other things. So, checking out the new museum at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, I found this Henson Creature Shop animatronic pigeon.…

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  • Bee Wary

    I’m as guilty as the next person: I’ve been reveling in this unseasonable weather. (It was 60 degrees here a few minutes ago.) But I’m reminded, by those canaries of the insect world, the honeybees, that something is amiss. You see, these warm days keep honeybees active. They’ve been flying out from the hive, but…

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  • Tono-Bungay!

    If we build it, we will trash it. The recently redone track bed at the 4th Avenue F & G station. I recently read H.G. Wells’ novel Tono-Bungay (1909). It is named for a product that makes the protagonist and his uncle a fortune. The stuff is “mediated water,” pure bunkum, of course, a patent…

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  • Ranger Robin Sez

    The uninhibited Ranger Robin Action Figure, no longer serving the Parks Department, tells it like it is:“Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux are turning over in their graves, thanks to Richard Meier, and the developers he whored out to, for spoiling the Long Meadow viewshed. Meanwhile, James S.T. Stranahan doesn’t just roll, he wants to…

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