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The Mall at Four Sparrow Marsh?
The twice re-scheduled public scope meeting for the proposed mall at Four Sparrow Marsh is tonight. The meeting is at 7pm in the Kings Plaza Community Room, 5100 Kings Plaza (intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Avenue U). All the delays have given me some time to look through the paperwork filed for the proposal, which…
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Coney Island Creeky
Coney Island is no longer an island and it is no longer full of what the Dutch called konijn, or, as the English would say, conies — that is, rabbits. Coney Island Creek, which cuts into the western end of the neighborhood, is all that remains of the watery border between the erstwhile island and…
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East Pond in Winter
Gray birch, a.k.a. white birch, Betula populifolia. A closer look at that birch bark. Big John’s Pond. The Raunt. Towering common reed, or phragmites. American crow overhead.
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A scant note on abundance
Extinction is forever. The Anthropocene Extinction we are living through is much discussed, but in this discussion something gets lost as we attempt to save the last hundred or thousand members of a particular species of charismatic megafauna. That something is the antithesis of extinction. It is the incredible abundance of animals and plants that…
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Just ducks, ducky
The other day I was actually heard to express some weariness with winter. Even me. Mostly, I’m just tired of putting on and taking off my boots, putting on and taking off my boots. A surefire antidote to the winter ice blues, though, is to go looking for waterfowl. These fat-swaddled birds let the cold…
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Three hour harbor tour
Thalatta, thalatta! cried Xenophon’s Greeks when, after a long struggle, they finally saw the Black Sea again. (In modern Greek, it’s thalasssa, thalassa, the sea, the sea!) I often think of this rejoicing when I see the water. Like the Aegean, another cradle of civilizations, New York City is an archipelago, with almost all of…
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Albedo in Brooklyn
The backyard light was on the other night and the light bounced back brightly into my apartment because of all the snow. Ah, I thought, albedo in action. Technically, albedo is a “ratio of reflected radiation from the surface to incident radiation upon it” (Wikipedia). Crossword fiends and Catholics will recognize the alb in the…
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Cardinals
I’m betting that an awful lot of people who say they don’t know their birds can recognize the cardinals. The Northern Cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis, is one of our most distinctive year-around birds. They are particularly obvious in winter, when the red male sticks out like a tropical flower in the snow. The female, although less…
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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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Backyard and Beyond 