Brooklyn Bridge Park
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Common Green Darner
A male Common Green Darner (Anax junius), one of our largest species of dragonfly. You should really click on the picture for a larger view, since there is some great detail here because this one perched quite a while below eye-level, allowing us all good looks as he rubbed his front legs over his eyes.…
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Flying Now
Painted Lady (Vanessa cardui). I’ve posted previously about separating these from the similar American Lady butterflies (Vanessa virginiensis); from this view, the four big wing spots mark the Painted; two big spots the American.Orange Bluet (Enallagma signatum) male. Small and slender, but striking when you see it: at Green-Wood’s Sylvan Water. At the nearby Valley…
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Brooklyn’s Two-Spotted Continue
Two years ago, I stumbled upon some unfamiliar ladybugs. There were Two-spotted (Adalia bipunctata), which turned out to be rather rare. It was the first Brooklyn report for the species. Last summer, the site was inaccessible to civilians because of construction. This weekend I took a look at the trees, as I usually do. They…
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More Sumac
Staghorn Sumac (Rhus typhina) in exuberant fuzziness.
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Lady-like
The Catalpa trees — both the Northern Catalpa (C. bignonioides) and the Southern (C. speciosa) are found in the park — are ladybug magnets. The large heart-shaped leaves are often sticky, perhaps from the excretions of aphids, a favorite ladybug food. Right now, the nymph stages of the lady beetles, these small but frightful looking…
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Fish
Gasping at the surface near the pier, this fish was in trouble. Or so I thought. But it seemed to successfully dive back into the deeps, so it might have been feeding at something I couldn’t see on the surface. About 14″ long: what is it? And here, soon after low tide way up the…
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Raptor Alignment
Aligned through the new Osprey nesting platform at Brooklyn Bridge Park’s ghost of Pier 4 is the 55 Water Street Peregrine scrape across the East River. It’s too late for Ospreys to nest here this season, but the falcons have three young (maybe four by now). You can spy on the falcons here; note, they…
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Tern Profile
And now the terns are back in town. This is a Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) on the piers of Brooklyn Bridge Park recently. Forster’s and Least are other locally regular terns during migration and summer, although you usually need to go to the city’s further edges to see them.
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Barn Swallows Wallowing
It’s rare to get a good solid look at a Barn Swallow (Hirundo rustica), considering they zip through the air at great speed most of the time in pursuit of flying insects, but a pair were gathering mud recently for their nest.Barn Swallows build mud pellet cups; I watched one in process last year in…
Backyard and Beyond 