Brooklyn
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Gifts of Sight and Sound
Saturday was an epic day of nature exploration here in the wide world of the Borough of Brooklyn. In the morning, I took a friend and her mother birding in Prospect Park. We saw some 44 species of birds, a good-turn out for our visiting Virginia birder. In the late afternoon, I joined two other…
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Slow Morning
By which I mean a chilly morning, according to bumble bee standards. Burly little things, they warm themselves up by muscular action on chilly spring mornings, getting the jump on other pollinators who are smaller and more solar-powered. This looks like a Bombus impatiens, which, for all I know, is how you look on Monday…
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Flowermania
It’s that time of year, when Backyard and Beyond starts to get overwhelmed with flowers.Some of this weeks sightings.
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Cocoon
Still visible on some bare trees out there, these hanging gardens are the cocoons of a bagworm moth in the family Psychidae. There’s a caterpillar in here who made this hanging tent of leaves last year so it could overwinter. There are some 1300-plus known members of the Psychidae world-wide. The better known in our…
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First Honeybees
Yesterday, I came upon the first honeybees I’ve seen this year. They were working the ornamental cherries at the Grand Army Plaza entrance to Prospect Park. One landed on my shirt. Remember, bees are not aggressive unless you go after them, or their hive. So don’t panic. Close your eyes and think of England if…
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Green-Wood
Cherries are starting to bloom.Although still chilly, the morning sun was strong enough to begin heating these hard cases up.The bulbs and corms, of course, are bursting with stored-up goodness. Dark-eyed Junco, a winter bird, still hanging around. Two weeks ago, when I was last in Green-Wood, the cemetery was all about the Common Raven,…
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Emergence
“Paging Dr. Kinsey, paging Dr. Kinsey! Gall wasp emergence on Henry Street…” Before he went into human sexuality in a big way, pride-of-Hoboken Alfred Kinsey was a specialist in gall wasps, a vast and largely unknown kingdom, at least to us non-specialists. Back in early February, I posted about two species of gall wasps on…
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We are here only a moment
Green-Wood Cemetery, like the city at large, lost a mess of trees during Sandy. One of them was this giant, which was also the home of a Red-tailed hawk nest for several years. Judging from Facebook, these pins were probably put in by the Cemetery’s tree specialist, Adam Rychlicki, who has been doing this sort…
Backyard and Beyond 