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Painted Turtle
The seasons turn. The years go ’round. Last March, I photographed a painted turtle, Chrysemys picta, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Japanese Pond. It was surrounded by numerous eastern red-eared sliders. This past Saturday, I found the same — or, hopefully, another? — painted turtle in the same area of the Pond (where the rocks…
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Look Down
One of the speedwells. I think it’s Persian speedwell, Veronica persica. One of the chickweeds. As with the speedwells, there are numerous species. Found both of these in Green-Wood last week.
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Look around
It is a truth universally acknowledged that I don’t have the camera & lenses for great bird photography. (You can find plenty of far better shots on the web). But one of the reasons I do this blog is to convey the message that everyone, anyone, can be an observer of wildness. Fancy gear is…
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Fort Tilden Stars
At the western-most parking lot at Fort Tilden, we came across a pile of treasures of suspicious provenance. There were perfectly intact shells of both our big whelk species, moon snails (including the largest I’ve ever seen), and lots of sea stars. I’ve never found a sea star on the beach around here, and usually…
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Clinton Street Blossoms
The magnolias are starting to bloom, and this year, perhaps under the influence of the Japanese films I’ve been watching at Film Forum, I’m finding them a bit too rich for my blood. The ripe fleshiness is more blowsy than sensual. And the ghostly white ones nod towards the terrors of the “Whiteness of the…
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Rockaway
Friends who live in the Rockaways showed us around last week. This barrier beach of a peninsula juts out of the soft underbelly of Queens as the sheltering arm of Jamaica Bay. It’s thickly settled on its eastern end, but Jacob Riis Beach and the Fort Tilden section of Gateway NRA provide some naturalist splendor.…
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Brooklyn Woodchuck
I’m bringing this out of the archives in case anybody ends up here from a nice article in the Times by Jesse Greenspan on city groundhogs/woodchucks, in which I am quoted.Through the urban naturalist grapevine, I knew that woodchucks lived in Green-Wood Cemetery, but I’d never run across one before. Yesterday, I noticed something oddly…
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On State St.
There’s still a dearth of nectar & pollen bearing flowers, but a small plot of fancy tulips was being worked over by some bees Saturday. I’ve recently checked in with both the feral honey bee nests I know of in Brooklyn, and both show no signs of activity. I hope it’s just the cold.Further down…
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Cattails on high
I was walking down Furman Street, which parallels the new Brooklyn Bridge Park and is half shadowed by the howl of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Passing one of the few buildings left from the days of dockland glory, I looked up. (The building is a garage on the 1929 map, between the old Ward Line and…
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Coney Island’s Endemic Species
You have to be a certain age to remember when Coney Island Whitefish teemed off of Brooklyn’s shores in such massive schools that beach-goers wouldn’t dare go into the water. Today, however, they’re a rare sight. Although sometimes mistaken for the pallid Manhattan eel (Mentula brevus), the Coney Island Whitefish is a unique species. Sitts coneius…
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Backyard and Beyond 