Brooklyn
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Back 40 Grasshopper
Less than half an inch long, this little grasshopper leapt out of the Back 40 greenery when I started to water and clung to the plastic (yeech!) fence.
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Furman St. Cattails in Summer
Back in March I noticed some improbable cattails growing from the roof of an old garage on Furman Street, underneath the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. I recently walked by again, both underneath and above.I think there might be some pragmites up there as well.
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Ladybugs
NSFW? Variegated ladybugs, Hippodamia variegata, making more beetles. Photo taken on Bond Street by the Gowanus Canal. Quite a bit of action, so to speak, on these leaves. Note the eggs below, the aphid (?) on the left, and the remains of something by the female beetle’s front right.
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Bristly midrib
Prickly lettuce, Lactuca scariola, a non-native growing cheek by jowl to the Gowanus on First St.
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Prospect Park in the Rain
Lullwater Bridge, sea of duckweed.Gall on witch-hazel Green heron, Butorides virescens, a park nester, and Black-crowned night heron, Nycticorax nycticorax, in the Lullwater.A young cottontail rabbit, Sylvilagus floridanus. Silver spotted skipper, Epargyreus clarus, in the coneflowers behind the Boathouse. In the same pollinator-friendly area, one of the most handsome of hymenoptera, a Golden Northern bumble…
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An Unusual Wildflower
One of the stranger wildflowers of the eastern forests is Conopholis americana, also known as squawroot, American cancer-root, and bearcorn. It looks like a fungus popping up out of the ground. But it’s a plant, and a good reminder that not all wildflowers are, well, wildflowery. This particular flower doesn’t photosynthesize; it lives by parasitizing…
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Mulberry Overhang
We don’t have many trees or bushes that have differently shaped leaves on the same plant. Sassafras (S. albidum), with its three different leaf-shapes, is one. (The roots of these used to be made into sassafras tea and sodas; a crushed leaf smells like a soda fountain root beer and is immensely refreshing.) The mulberries…
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Three Gowanus Trees
The Valley of the Shadow of the Gowanus, as I like to call it, is the lowland between the ridge of Brooklyn Heights and the Harbor Hill Moraine. The western slope of Park Slope and the eastern slope of Punkiesburg (Cobble Hill) used to drain down into the marshy Gowanus creek, thought to have been…
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Arches
It does us good to remind ourselves that Prospect Park is a synthesis of the natural and the unnatural. The park is a highly engineered production, with drainage tiles laid underneath the Long Meadow, and fire hydrants in the middle of the Midwood, and the old reservoir built into Lookout Hill.Yesterday, the delightful Christopher Gray,…
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Beyond the Back 40
If you leave it alone, they will come. Oh, yes, they will. Daisy fleabane, Japanese knotweed, and some worts (perhaps a hogwort or two?) fill the back 2/3rds my building’s backyard. This veldt is beyond the fence containing my own Back 40 and under the purview of the upstairs neighbor, known here ’bouts as Stompy…
Backyard and Beyond 