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.”

  • Mammal Monday

    First you have to chew off the coating of this black walnut, then break through the shell.

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  • Royal Cats

    I can count the Monarch caterpillars I’ve seen this year on one hand, and one of them was dead. This is one of the four live ones. Will these two eggs, seen laid on September 11, get as far as big fat caterpillars about to pupate? Also that Monday, a pair were mating.

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  • Monarchs on the Move

    Four individuals above. More shots of them below:

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  • Asian Mud-dauber

    There’s a new mud-dauber in the mix: Sceliphron curvatum. Indigenous to the submontane regions around the great Asian mountain chains, it is now invasive in Europe. They were introduced to North America around a decade ago. They just made it as far west as Minnesota this year. I’ve only seen one of them, and not…

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  • Raptor Wednesday On Thursday

    August 29: first Merlin I’ve seen in Brooklyn since March. On a perch usually favored by American Kestrels.

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  • Morning…

    A cool morning found several Two-spotted Scoliid Wasps unusually still. Common Eastern Bumblebee, too. There’s also little black and red beetle in the flowers that I didn’t notice at the time.

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  • American Dagger

    The larval stage of Acronicta americana is more spectacular than the adult moth. These can be white-haired as well as yellow, but the long black setae are found in all forms. (Anything so extravagantly attired should be expected to be irritable to the skin.) They’re generalists and find ash, elm, hickory, oak, willow, and several…

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  • Catch and Release

    Try as it might, this Double-crested Cormorant could not swallow this Summer Flounder right off the edge of Lower Manhattan.

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  • Reflections of A Naturalist

    Reflected in two different Polished Lady Beetles/Cycloneda munda. (Nice detail on the head and pronotum patterns here, btw, helpful in distinguishing these from the occasional other spot-less ladybugs one comes across)

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  • And Revery

    To make a prairie, says Emily Dickinson, you need one clover and one bee. (Also, to be frank today, some seed mixes.) Link to the ED poem has a parenthetical 1755 in title, which has led to at least one person on Facebook saying the poem was written in 1755, which would be remarkable since…

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