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.”

  • Osage Orange

    “Don’t sit under the Osage Orange with anybody else but me.” Maclura pomifera, a.k.a. bois d’arc, bodark, hedge-apple. There are several in Prospect Park, but this one in the Nethermead is the park’s finest example. It should be dropping its cargo of softball-sized fruits any second now. Folk belief has these “apples” used to scare…

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  • Prospect Park: A Study in Green

    Earlier today at the Binnen Water. You can de-Impressionism this by clicking on it to open it to a larger size.

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  • Orbweaver Requiem

    I returned to the house Sunday afternoon to find Saturday’s spider on the floor. A single silk line connected my desk chair to the desk. Brooklyn Invertebrate CSI: The rear of the abdomen looks deflated, while the front is grotesquely distended. Parasite? Disease?

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  • Native Meadow Mix

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  • Top of the Island

    Freshkills Park had its second annual “sneakpeak” open house Sunday. On the western end of Staten Island, Fresh Kills, as it was then called, was the site of one of the world’s largest landfills. The last barge of trash was delivered in 2001. Other historic highlights: NYC’s ocean dumping outlawed by Supreme Court 1934; Fresh…

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  • Six ways of looking at a spider

    While I was putting together yesterday’s post and eating three different kinds of New York state grapes from the farmer’s market, I noticed something alive in the middle of the air under my desk. It was slowly descending. And then rather more quickly ascending. She tried several times to crawl up onto the top of…

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  • Weekend Naturalist

    Through the Naturalists’ Gate at 77th Street, past the enormous head of the great geographer Alexander von and under the eagle eye of this AMNH topper I entered the Central Park and rambled in the Ramble in search of the barred owl that had been reported yesterday. The owl remained with Minerva, although the local…

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  • Tsankawi Shelter

    Part of Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico, the Tsankawi Historic Sites surround and top this mesa:Several caves, which 800 years ago were back rooms for the ancestral Pueblo people who lived here, dot the mesa flanks:Inside this one was this extraordinary petroglyph:And this bird nest:Still sheltering, after all these years.

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  • Updates

    I’ve hardly spent more than a couple days in NYC in the last month, so, even with the universal internet, I didn’t pay all that much attention to things going on around the virtual ‘hood. In catching up, I want to alert you to a few things you may also have missed: Melissa, Out Walking…

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  • Whose woods these are…

    Being out of town and much occupied with family matters, I missed last Friday’s inauguration of my friend Marielle Anzelone’s City Room series on autumn in a Manhattan forest. The second part of this weekly project, which runs until the first day of winter, comes out today this Friday. You must check it out, and…

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