Backyard and Beyond

Starting out from Brooklyn, an amateur naturalist explores our world.

As John Burroughs said, “The place to observe nature is where you are.”

  • Warning: Plant Porn

    Just wait until the fundamentalists find out that flowers have BOTH SEX PARTS. Cats and dogs living together! If this isn’t “Trans Indoctrination,” I don’t know what is. If you haven’t heard, some fascist canon-fodder got a book pulled from a middle grade community reading event in Virginia because it has an oak in it.…

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    Warning: Plant Porn

  • Mammal Monday

    They eat dandelions, leaves and flowers.

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    Mammal Monday

  • Cellophane Nests

    A south-facing slope with open patches of dirt. Look closer… Here’s somebody’s nest. I had to come back another day to see her in there. Unequal Cellophane Bee/Colletes inaequalis. Looks like another. And another. Like most of our wild bee species, Cellophane bees are solitary nesters. They may aggregate their nests in suitable terrain. There…

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    Cellophane Nests

  • Golden One

    Golden Dung Fly. Hey, it’s a living.

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    Golden One

  • Happiness Is A Warm Bluebird

    And a happy Bluebird is a well-fed Bluebird.

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    Happiness Is A Warm Bluebird

  • Raptor Wednesday

    The female. The nest? Sure looks like it, after all. Within a minute of her entry into the hole, the pigeons were back. These showed up across the street during the two days I didn’t pass by. These will provide quite the smorgasbord for a growing Kestrel family.

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    Raptor Wednesday

  • Kestrels, Pt. II

    Walking by the kestrel copulation building looking for little falcons and holes and cornices. Nothing from across the street. But from a block away… I see the male perched above a rather small hole. Could this be it? I think so, but damn it looks like a tight fit. But I want confirmation: to see…

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  • Kestrels, Pt. I

    A female American Kestrel perched in a pine on the edge of Green-Wood took off and headed towards the Neo-Gothic gatehouse, stirred up the Monk Parrots, rounded it, and came back towards me and the fence. She landed on a chimney pot a full block away. And she had prey with her up there. Gosh,…

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  • Bee Knowing

    This book will buzz your world. Pollinator ecologist Buchmann has put together a very readable compendium of what we have learned about the “thoughts, memories, and personalities of bees.” Every word in that subtitle except “and” will probably come as a surprise to many people not keeping up with the scientific literature. Bees and other…

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    Bee Knowing

  • Night Warbling

    Friend-of-blog Geoff Wisner has a new book coming out. Pre-ordering it at this link saves you money and supports the Thoreau Society, not that nasty plutocratic emperor of Amazon. The book gathers a large sampling of Thoreau’s many writings about birds over the years and organizes them through a single calendrical year. This will doubtlessly…

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    Night Warbling