Brooklyn
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The Mall at Four Sparrow Marsh?
The twice re-scheduled public scope meeting for the proposed mall at Four Sparrow Marsh is tonight. The meeting is at 7pm in the Kings Plaza Community Room, 5100 Kings Plaza (intersection of Flatbush Avenue and Avenue U). All the delays have given me some time to look through the paperwork filed for the proposal, which…
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Coney Island Creeky
Coney Island is no longer an island and it is no longer full of what the Dutch called konijn, or, as the English would say, conies — that is, rabbits. Coney Island Creek, which cuts into the western end of the neighborhood, is all that remains of the watery border between the erstwhile island and…
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Just ducks, ducky
The other day I was actually heard to express some weariness with winter. Even me. Mostly, I’m just tired of putting on and taking off my boots, putting on and taking off my boots. A surefire antidote to the winter ice blues, though, is to go looking for waterfowl. These fat-swaddled birds let the cold…
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Albedo in Brooklyn
The backyard light was on the other night and the light bounced back brightly into my apartment because of all the snow. Ah, I thought, albedo in action. Technically, albedo is a “ratio of reflected radiation from the surface to incident radiation upon it” (Wikipedia). Crossword fiends and Catholics will recognize the alb in the…
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Cardinals
I’m betting that an awful lot of people who say they don’t know their birds can recognize the cardinals. The Northern Cardinal, Cardinalis cardinalis, is one of our most distinctive year-around birds. They are particularly obvious in winter, when the red male sticks out like a tropical flower in the snow. The female, although less…
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Wild Urban Plants
Let us now praise infamous weeds. “It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder how”… it got that way. Well, as early as 1672, a couple dozen European plants were already growing spontaneously in New England… Today, there are Paulownia trees growing on both ends of the Union Street Bridge over the Gowanus Canal.…
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Mud daubing neighbors
The Back 40, my tiny backyard, is dominated by the overhang of the balconies the upstairs neighbors enjoy. Rusting I-beams support this addition to the building. I recently glanced up and found that one of the beams supports something else entirely. Thanks to the good people at Bug Guide, I can tell you that this…
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Another interior denizen
I’ve seen these around the apartment a couple of times. This one I found in the tub. Naturally, I was curious… This is a spider beetle, a member of the family Ptinidae; there are about 50 species in the U.S., mostly in the Southwest. But wait, a spider beetle? Does that compute? Spiders, you’ll remember,…
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Winter II
Maybe it was my peripatetic upbringing, but I didn’t know until fairly recently that trees carry their buds all through winter. I just assumed they appeared right before they opened up as the days grew longer and temperatures rose in the spring. This was another instance of my not actually seeing while I was looking.…
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Four Sparrow Marsh-opedia
Almost everything you wanted to know about Four Sparrow Marsh, but were afraid to ask: Four Sparrow Marsh is located at the NE intersection of Flatbush and the Shore Parkway (the blue pin). “Four Sparrow Marsh Preserve contains several types of habitats besides salt marsh, including low brush; deciduous forest consisting mainly of cherry, elm,…
Backyard and Beyond 