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Two wasps
Both of these were spotted in Central Park:Bald-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata). These are the social wasps that make the large, football-shaped paper nests you see in trees, especially in winter. The nests are completely inactive in winter and unused the following year. The wasp is chewing the old wood of this tree; it’s how they…
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Gowanus Fish
Life in the Gowanus, and I don’t mean the mythological Carroll Gardens flipper-baby frogmen that are supposedly heard plopping and flopping in the greasy water on still moonless nights.
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Those Animals!
A local tabloid has seen fit to make up a name for the very rare Grey-headed gull at Coney Island. From the NY birding list, I learned that the birders the tabloider talked to said the bird didn’t have a nickname and that they didn’t name wild animals. When the tabloider nevertheless offered some suggestions…
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Barge Music
Ten Barn Swallows (Hirundo rustica) perching on the hull of Bargemusic at Fulton Ferry Landing on a recent morning. The swallows patrol Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Promenade above for insects caught in mid-air. They should be heading south in about a month or two.
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Prospect Park Summer
One of the parent swans had just nearly kicked the ass of yet another unleashed dog.I think they were hanging outside their lamp-post nest because it was even more blazingly hot inside. But, I didn’t stick around long enough to ask, or even to focus all that well.
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Fruiting Body
The natural world erupts into my consciousness — sight, sound, smell — the key is observation, a practice especially challenging in the hyperactive, sense-whelming city. Here I am planning to cross a highway on-ramp while not being run over, dodging masses of pigeon droppings under an overpass, noticing a fruit on the sidewalk. Looking up.…
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Goldenish Rainy Treethingie
Argh! Tree names! Enough to drive you crazy. The NYC Parks Dept.’s badass-streets-approved Goldenraintree (draught, salt, high pH, poor soils) is Sibley’s Golden Rain-tree (a/k/a Shower Tree, Pride of India, Varnish Tree, Gate Tree), which is not to be confused with Common Laburnum, (a/k/a Golden Chain-tree, Golden Rain Tree). Anyway, Koelreuteria paniculata is blooming now,…
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Up the Creek
Twisty estuary: this is a sculptural map of Newtown Creek’s original watershed. The Creek, separating Greenpoint, Brooklyn, from Hunters Point, LIC,Sunnyside, and Blissville, Queens, was long ago renown for its oysters. It’s now a Superfund site, the result of more than a century of industrial pollution. Sections of Greenpoint itself sit on a underground oil…
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Katydids
Now the nights are ticking with katydids. We have several species in the city: check out the results of the 2009 Cricket Crawl, which listened for crickets and katydids (along with grasshoppers, these insects are all in the Orthoptera order). The clicks, tzips, and “ka-ty-did she did she didn’t” of the night will last into…
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Grapevine Beetle
I found this Grapevine Beetle (Pelidnota punctata) dead on a tree stump, being scouted out by a fly. It’s about an inch long; three spots on each elytron, two on the pronotum like false eyes (these are sometimes absent). The species likes parks, gardens, and woodlands, and are so named because they feed on grapevines,…
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Backyard and Beyond 