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Wild Urban Plants
Let us now praise infamous weeds. “It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how”… it got that way. Well, as early as 1672, a couple dozen European plants were already growing spontaneously in New England… Today, there are Paulownia trees growing on both ends of the Union Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal.…
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Mud daubing neighbors
The Back 40, my tiny backyard, is dominated by the overhang of the balconies the upstairs neighbors enjoy. Rusting I-beams support this addition to the building. I recently glanced up and found that one of the beams supports something else entirely. Thanks to the good people at Bug Guide, I can tell you that this…
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Everybody talks about the climate
…(except the President) but nobody does anything about it, as Mark Twain almost said. A lot more snow than we’ve seen for a while and a brief snap of the Arctic chilly-willies means you must have heard the new cliché in the media stream, if not in person: “So much for global warming.” Meanwhile, the…
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Winter Trio
The winter beach can be an unforgiving landscape, scraped by the wind and beaten by the waves. There are almost always dead sea birds to be found washed ashore. This red-breasted merganser was on its way to being thoroughly recycled. Note the serrated jaws here, a characteristic of the species notably lacking in the loons.…
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Another interior denizen
I’ve seen these around the apartment a couple of times. This one I found in the tub. Naturally, I was curious… This is a spider beetle, a member of the family Ptinidae; there are about 50 species in the U.S., mostly in the Southwest. But wait, a spider beetle? Does that compute? Spiders, you’ll remember,…
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Winter II
Maybe it was my peripatetic upbringing, but I didn’t know until fairly recently that trees carry their buds all through winter. I just assumed they appeared right before they opened up as the days grew longer and temperatures rose in the spring. This was another instance of my not actually seeing while I was looking.…
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Four Sparrow Marsh-opedia
Almost everything you wanted to know about Four Sparrow Marsh, but were afraid to ask: Four Sparrow Marsh is located at the NE intersection of Flatbush and the Shore Parkway (the blue pin). “Four Sparrow Marsh Preserve contains several types of habitats besides salt marsh, including low brush; deciduous forest consisting mainly of cherry, elm,…
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Winter I
This is the season of potential. All around us in natural nooks and crannies are the seeds, eggs, and larvae of the spring’s renaissance. These are egg masses, I presume of some kind of insect. Another nearby mass was wrapped with a leaf. Ha, that old trick!
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Backyard and Beyond 