Brooklyn
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Fruiting Body
The natural world erupts into my consciousness — sight, sound, smell — the key is observation, a practice especially challenging in the hyperactive, sense-whelming city. Here I am planning to cross a highway on-ramp while not being run over, dodging masses of pigeon droppings under an overpass, noticing a fruit on the sidewalk. Looking up.…
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Goldenish Rainy Treethingie
Argh! Tree names! Enough to drive you crazy. The NYC Parks Dept.’s badass-streets-approved Goldenraintree (draught, salt, high pH, poor soils) is Sibley’s Golden Rain-tree (a/k/a Shower Tree, Pride of India, Varnish Tree, Gate Tree), which is not to be confused with Common Laburnum, (a/k/a Golden Chain-tree, Golden Rain Tree). Anyway, Koelreuteria paniculata is blooming now,…
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Katydids
Now the nights are ticking with katydids. We have several species in the city: check out the results of the 2009 Cricket Crawl, which listened for crickets and katydids (along with grasshoppers, these insects are all in the Orthoptera order). The clicks, tzips, and “ka-ty-did she did she didn’t” of the night will last into…
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Twitching: Grey-headed Gull
A Grey-headed Gull (Chroicocephalus cirrocephalus), native to the South America and Africa, has been spotted on Coney Island. Where else? It’s been there several days now, often hanging out in front of the WonderWheel and living on the castoff of beach-goers. This may be only the second confirmed sighting in the U.S. As a result,…
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Earth Space
I know there’s plenty of gnashing of teeth over the end of the space shuttle program, a sort of a low-earth-orbit FedEx, but I invite the star-crossed to look around them down here with more attention. There’s so much yet to be discovered here on Earth. For instance, I was going through some photos, and…
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Return of the Prodigal?
A Black-and-Yellow Mud Dauber, Sceliphron caementarium, in the Back 40 today while I was watering parched plants. It was checking out the moist concrete, perhaps looking for a drink or some mud. I’ve noticed these wasps since the local nest started erupting last month, but they are very brief visitors. They probably don’t go far,…
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Chilling Flashback
The Back 40 im Schnee, January 27, 2011. As it’s forecast to top 100F today — not including the heat index bump of broiling tarmac, radiating concrete, greenhouse glass, and over-stressed generators fighting it all and thus burning even more coal to help heat things up even more — this one’s for you, Midwest/East, and…
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City Habitat
Now that the dog-day cicadas have started to emerge from their years underground, their enemy, the cicada wasps, emerge as well. And since our street trees have roots, which is what the cicadas live on while during their nymph stage, so too do our streets have these wasps.Yesterday, walking in Brooklyn Heights, I found a…
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Spiny-leaved sow thistle, Sonchus asper, in a Columbia Street tree pit. A non-native species, but well-settled. Judging from my dad, whose hair I inherited, this is what my head will look like some day.
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Cicadas Emerging
I was away from the city for a week, so the cicada I heard on Henry Street this morning was my first of the year. It’s the quintessential sound of summer. Previous cicada-themed posts: Part I, Part II, and Part III.
Backyard and Beyond 