Backyard and Beyond

Starting out from Brooklyn, an amateur naturalist explores our world.

As John Burroughs said, “The place to observe nature is where you are.”

Jamaica Bay

  • Blue-themed

    The beach plums are ripe out at Jamaica Bay. My mother used to make beach plum jam, but I’m afraid I wasn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate the stuff. I was crazy for the strawberry jam she made, though. Which of course ruined me for life, since now I know what real jam tastes like, and…

    mthew

  • Hymenoptera

    It’s National Pollinator Week. The membrane-winged insects, order Hymenoptera, encompass the bees, wasps, and ants (the queens and males of the ants have wings but shed them after mating). Unlike the flies, and there a number of flies who mimic bees, hymenoptera have four wings that merge together with a sort of natural velcro, so…

    mthew

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  • Mud snail

    A marine mud snail, found along the littoral of the city in great bunches. Dead Horse Bay has thickets of them. This one was from Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge; the beach there is normally closed but we went down to the water with a couple of the cutest rangers ever seen in a national park,…

    mthew

  • Out at Jamaica Bay

    “You must take the A train” — if you want to see the prickly pear cactus in bloom. Personally, I’d drop everything to go see it. It’s the only cactus in the region, Opuntia humifusa, and it loves the sandy Mid-Atlantic Plain, the outer lands, (of which portions of Brooklyn and Queens are included). Bumble…

    mthew

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  • Field Notes: JBWR

    There were so many tree swallows out at Jamaica Bay even I could get good shoots without a real telephoto. Birds seen: DC cormorant, Great egret, Snowy egret, Little blue heron, Tricolored heron, Glossy Ibis, Mute swan, Brant, Canada goose, American black duck, Gadwell, mallard, Northern shoveller, Greater scaup, Bufflehead, Ruddy duck, red-breasted merganser, Osprey,…

    mthew

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  • Scolopax minor

    It was an unusually cold Saturday night, but damn it, it was spring, and the timberdoodles were in town. We went out to Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge to listen for them. The American woodcock, Scolopax minor, as it is more formally known, is a shorebird that isn’t. It is related to the sandpipers, and looks…

    mthew

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  • Field Notes: JBWR Beetles UPDATED

    Photographs by N. Arnzen. There are something like 350,000 described species of beetles, order Coleoptera, and presumably many more that are not described. I once read that there are more species of beetles than all other species of animals combined, which may not be right, but it does give you some sense of their dominance…

    mthew

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