Brooklyn
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Bait?
A Great Black-backed Gull scavenges a Horseshoe crab. This is the last full moon of the Horseshoe spawning season. Gravid females can lay tens of thousands of eggs during the season, making successive trips to shallowly bury their eggs at the high tide line. Very few of those eggs become adults. I’ve seen one estimate…
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Skates
Sun-dried, the remains of a skate repose on that great depository of all things, the beach, Jamaica Bay branch. This may be the Little or Common Skate, Leucoraja erinacea. Cartilaginous like their relatives the sharks, skates reproduce by laying eggs, unlike their near look-a-likes the rays, who bear live young. Rays also have longer, more…
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Arthropods
Hey! a) I got close enough to this slender inch-long damselfly to capture some detail, notably the broken stripes on the thorax, and hence b) I declare this to be a male Fragile Forktail (Ishnura posita). The pollen pack on this bumblebee, foraging in cluster of sumac flowers, is going to make some baby bumblebees…
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Green-Wood
Fringetree. Galls clustering on a hickory. The leaves of one of that cluster of Common Persimmon trees. A Great Egret being photogenic as always. Water Lily in the Valley Water; there were only a few blossoms yet. American Lady butterflies amid a horde of honey and bumble bees.
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7 Spotted, 13 Spotted
Pupating larva, I assume of the Seven-Spotted Lady Beetle (Coccinella septempunctata), adults of which who were all around Four Sparrow Marsh: A species introduced from Europe to eat aphids. Another commercially available aphid eater is the Convergent Lady Beetle (Hippodamia convergens), which is exported out of California:Like the Multicolored Asian Lady Beetle, this is also…
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Question Mark?
The question mark on a Question Mark butterfly (Polygonia interrogationis) looks a little more like a semi-colon. These and their cousins the Eastern Commas are also called Anglewings more generically because their wings don’t have the rounded shape of most of our butterflies. This one was slurping up Viburnum nectar in Brooklyn Bridge Park recently.…
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Is this heaven?
Well, I can’t speak to that question, having no expertise in the matter, but I can tell you that this picture is in fact of a part of Brooklyn, New York, borough of 2.5 million-plus people. Welcome to Backyard and Beyond, where I explore the natural history of the urban frontier. I hope you like…
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Forecast: Cottonwood Flurries
Eastern Cottonwoods (Populus deltoides) pods are peeling back and letting rip, launching kerjillions of seeds on the wind.This is why they call them “cottonwood.”And piled up like snow. Photos above from Brooklyn Bridge Park. Photo below from Broad Channel:Stand down-wind of one.
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The day in birds
My day in birds began just after 5 a.m. when I woke to the pre-dawn chorus of the local House Sparrows. Argh! I grumbled something and rolled over. Between rain clouds, I went out to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge in the middle of the day. Some thirty-seven species of birds and three mosquito bites. Many…
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Premature Juneberries
Some of the local Amelanchier (a.k.a. Shadblow, Serviceberry, etc.) berries are purple-ripe. Others are coming along fast:Gowanus street top, Brooklyn Bridge Park bottom.
Backyard and Beyond 