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Birding Prospect
As I won’t be getting to Prospect Park for the next several days, I decided I needed an early April census of birds to compare the coming weeks to. Yesterday, I entered the Park at 9th Street and walked down to the Pools and through the Ravine and across the Midwood and the Vale and…
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Snail tales, part II
They leave a trail of slime and eat your plants, or at least some of them do, but gastropods, with their shells, love darts (!), and hermaphroditism, are as remarkable as any other life-form. (Until you’ve seen slugs mating, my friend, you have not lived. A future post will get sluggy. ) Last autumn, while…
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In Green-Wood
In Green-Wood, a couple of frogs, and many, many tadpoles. Plump tadpoles.
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Snail tales, part I
My Brooklyn backyard is a wall- and fence-enclosed concrete rectangle some 14 by 25 feet in size. A metal balcony and stair overshadowed about one third of the space. Very little sun reaches it during the winter, but come spring it is much less like the bottom of a well. In summer, it’s hot and…
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Field Notes: Four Sparrow Marsh
Birding, or any other natural history pursuit, depends upon the kindness of strangers and friends. We all learn from each other. This in prelude to saying I have no anxiety of influence about this: I followed the lead of the City Birder and went to Four Sparrow Marsh yesterday. It was my first time there.…
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Natural Object: Paleontological Find
Brooklyn, which is located at the mouth of what Walt Whitman called “fish-shaped Paumanok,” using a Native American word for what we now call Long Island, is, geologically speaking, loosey-goosey. We are sitting on glacial till, the rubble (sands, clays, gravels, erratics, etc.) pushed down here during the Pleistocene by the ice. (There was…
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Insects as outlaws
I went to hear Hugh Raffles read from and talk about his new book, Insectopedia, yesterday. The book is about the entangled intersection between humans and insects, and the profound ambiguity of that intersection (from our perspective). I haven’t read it yet. But I was really struck by something he said. He mentioned an Elias…
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In the Back 40: Mummified Millipede
I found this in the Back 40 (inches) last week. It’s probably a leftover from last year. The Back 40, to bring you up to speed, is my small, fenced & walled concrete slab of backyard. Here, near the west coast of Brooklyn, USA, I get what I think is a fair (and wondrous) amount…
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Quince blooming in the rain
The local quince tree, a cultivar of Cydonia oblonga. This is not your average NYC street tree; it’s not even on the official street tree list. But there you go. It’s here, it’s blooming, and it usually fruits — smaller pomes than you see in the supermarket. Actually, you probably don’t see quince in the…
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Interior insect
I found this insect working its way up the bathroom wall Sunday while I was flossing. I love the sharp triangular shape of the wings. If anybody knows what it is, or where it fits among the hexapoda, let me know. It was less than a quarter-inch long, which made for challenging photography, and a…
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Backyard and Beyond 