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.”

  • Confessions of a warblerholic

    The wood warblers have returned, as they have done for millennia unnumbered. They are coming out of a night sky thick with migrating birds, thickets that show up on Doppler radar like weather patterns, falling on the green islands of the city to eat furiously before catching another tailwind to fly north to breed. And…

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  • Where the buffalo roam

    From an old school spring-rolled wall map that looked like it dated to the mid-1960s, seen in a loft on Washington Avenue in Wallabout on the Clinton Hill House Tour this past Sunday. The American buffalo, actually a bison, once did roam in the eastern woodlands, along with their megafauna cousins.

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  • Listening

    Last Sunday, I led a group of twenty on what I called the Listening Tour in Prospect Park. The tour was sponsored by Proteus Gowanus, the interdisciplinary gallery and reading room, which is currently hosting an exhibition called “Paradise.” We were in Prospect for the simple reason that it is a paradise of birds. A…

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  • Bird Week

    This is Bird Week at the New York Times’ City Room. If you’ve found my blog by way of their recommendation, welcome! Please consider subscribing for the freshly baked, ad-free, posts of tomorrow and the days ahead. In the meantime, get out there and watch the birds. You can start on the streets, where house…

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  • Shhhh

    We are out listening to the heartbeat of paradise this morning. When you look in the mirror, what do you see? Do you see you’re related to everything else alive on this finite planet? Do you see that you are essentially solar powered? Do you see how you exist because of the waste product of…

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  • BK 4BR Park Vue Fully Stocked

    The Nethermead Arches is a great place for wasp condos. The bridge provides protection from the sun and rain, so organpipe mud-dauber wasps, Trypoxylon politum, build their nests upon its vertical surfaces. Each tube here is made up of several separate cells. An egg was laid in each cell with a cache of paralyzed spiders…

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  • American Chestnut

    Until recently, I didn’t know that American chestnut trees, Castanea dentata, were growing in Prospect Park. Turns out some were planted in 2004. Several of these have survived, but, like the 1,400 chestnut trees killed in the park in the early 20th century, they are doomed by the chestnut blight. This fungus, Cryphonectria parasitica, was…

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  • Tick

    I found four dog ticks crawling up my legs yesterday. This was a first for me within the bounds of the city. I was at Four Sparrow Marsh on the edge of Brooklyn. (My companion, on the other ankle, found none; maybe because of her wellies or her press pass.) As you can tell from…

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  • Lost Dogs

    Won’t you please help these dogs find new homes with responsible pet owners?Just a small sampling of unleashed dogs in Prospect Park. Some humans continue to flaunt the common sense rules about keeping dogs leashed in all parts of the park except for the Long Meadow, Nethermead, and Peninsula during off-leash hours (9pm-1am & 5am-9am).…

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  • Phylloxera

    As a miniscule part of the complex life-system of the planet, I understand that everything comes back to the nature that surrounds me and is me. Most of the invasive species that have crossed the oceans have come from Eurasia. The Americas, long separated from the planet’s largest continent, were sitting ducks for viruses, bacteria,…

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