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Above Brooklyn
A perfect morning, clear, clean, and warming up. Carrying fourteen pounds of feline for his appointment with a… uh, cat scanner… I saw the following birds: busy, loud house sparrows, staking out their nesting sites, squabbling over nesting material; starlings, sailing like kites; a lone silent crow flapping by; at least one noisy blue jay…
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Natural object: Ginkgo
This is the tip of a knobby spur twig of a gingko branch that had been knocked down in the snow some weeks back in Prospect Park. I brought it home and popped it in some water to see if it would leaf-out. Slowly, but surely, it is. It has an undersea look to it…
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Field Notes: Green-Wood
Top: l-r, monk parakeet; red maple (?); dawn redwood cones. Middle: bald-faced hornet comb; honey bees; honey bee nest. Bottom: leeches on turtle plastron; live red sliders; witch hazel in bloom. Took a walk through Green-Wood Cemetery today. This Victorian garden necropolis sits upon the flank of Brooklyn’s Harbor Hill Moraine, making it the highest…
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Mimus polyglottos
The Back 40 (Inches) is what I call my rented backyard. It is in the southeast corner pocket of a Brooklyn, NY, USA, block. Next door to the south, over a brick wall, is a double Land Rover parking space sandwiched between two ruins (house, carriage house; all owned by the very idle rich). Next…
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Blow downs in Prospect
More than 50 trees were brought down in Prospect Park during this weekend’s terrible storm. Several were venerable. I haven’t made it to the park yet, but I fear I will be missing some old friends. I still mourn a fine old white oak, which might have dated back to near the birth of the…
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Natural object: Owl pellet
An owl pellet from the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, “collected” on Tuesday. Owls are gobblers, scarfing down their food whole. The undigestible bits of bone and fur and feather are coughed up in pellets. You may have dissected some in school (I missed out), because you can pretty much put together what the owl ate by…
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Review: The Journal
The Journal: 1837-1861 By Henry David Thoreau Edited by Damion Searls Preface by John R. Stilgoe New York Review Books. 677 pp. $22.95 “‘What are you doing now?’ he asked. ‘Do you keep a journal?’ So I make my first entry to-day.” So it began, October 22, 1837. Twenty-year-old David Henry Thoreau, who would never…
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First Bees of 2010!
Yesterday, I went through the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where things are still pretty quiet plant and arthropod-wise. There were, however and hallelujah, honey bees to be found in the crocuses. Apis mellifera is in the house! These are the first bees I’ve seen this year. Nothing says “spring has begun” to me more than this.…
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Brooklyn Bestiary: An Exhibit
An exhibit of prints by Lisa Studier opens today the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch at Grand Army Plaza. Her subjects are the animals living right here in Brooklyn, which go sadly unnoticed by the great majority of (human) residents. How could I not be interested? The natural world is everywhere, we have only to…
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Field Notes: Dead Horse Bay
For a motley collection of unnatural history, Dead Horse Bay at the southern end of Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn is the place to go. It’s the city’s old refuse heap, and it is eroding into Jamaica Bay, providing archeologists studying the ruined civilization of the 20th century with many a wondrous artifact. . My ode…
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Backyard and Beyond 