Brooklyn
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Monarchy
An unusually dark Monarch caterpillar found at that little wonderland of wildness, Brooklyn Bridge Park. The place was full of standard-colored Monarchs about two weeks earlier. This one was the only one seen on a more recent visit. It’s late, but probably not too late. Nearby, I found the remains of a pupa. Also found…
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Chrysalis
The remains of a pupa, or chrysalis. This was, I think, the temporary home of a specimen of a Monarch, Danaus plexippus, as it underwent metamorphosis from caterpillar to butterfly. The caterpillars themselves were much in evidence here in Brooklyn Bridge Park at the end of August, gobbling up milkweed. Curiously, the milkweeds contains noxious…
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Fieldnotes: Muskrats
If you build it, they will come. Is this your typical muskrat habitat? On Sunday, looking for more caterpillars and exuviae in Brooklyn Bridge Park, we ran into a couple of muskrats, Ondatra zibethicus, munching away on the new plantings. Yes, we were surprised. One of the animals was a youngster, and some comments found…
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Hymenoptera
We went into Prospect Park on Saturday with a group from the Bee Watchers study. John Ascher of the American Museum of Natural History, whose fingers are visible below, led the expedition — which actually didn’t go very far since there were plenty of plants in bloom near the Boat House, where we began. There…
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Pin Oak Stripped
This fine old pin oak on Washington Ave. in Clinton Hill was shock-shorn by the tornado and/or micro burst event of Thursday evening. The bole, or trunk, seems to have been well anchored, but all the limbs and branches were, shall we say, de-tasseled. For several hours, in fact, the limbs blocked the street. By…
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Monarchs
A passel of monarch butterfly caterpillars, Danaus plexippus, were denuding some milkweed around the waterworks at the Brooklyn Bridge Park recently. The monarch is probably our most familiar butterfly. The generation we see here may be the one that, come winged adulthood, makes the epic long march of a flight towards the cool cloud forests…
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Dragonflies
Brooklyn Bridge Park is now open at its northern end, in the shadow of the great bridge. Here small pools and streams, part of the park’s landscaping and drainage system, are newly planted with a host of plants. And what freshwater body is complete without dragonflies? Recently, under a hot sun, I watched twelve-spotted skimmers,…
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Waste spaces
A differential grasshopper, Melanoplus differntialis, on some kind of smartweed. This clump of waste space-favoring weed was found on a downbeat block of Pacific Street in Boreum Hill, and just goes to show what happens when you look closely at even the commonest things.
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Minor Produce
From the Back 40: a vest-pocket garden makes produce that fits into a chest pocket.
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Park Lobster
Crayfish, actually, and only related to the lobsters — but a little B-52s reference does get the Sunday morning heart a-pumping. With the camera flash, this fearless crawdaddy sure does look like a cooked lobster. When it saw me, it reared up, all three inches of it, to let me know that it was a…
Backyard and Beyond 