Nantucket
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Summer Flounder
D’oh! Forgot to take my camera when we took Nora to the Maria Mitchell Aquarium. Next time. But in the meantime, on the porch of the MMA administrative building, next to the whale bone, I found this dessicated Summer Flounder (Paralichthys dentatus), classic example of a flatfish with both its eyes on the top side.…
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Burying Beetles
Burying beetles, also called sexton beetles, after the church employee traditionally in charge of the congregation’s corpses, need carrion. They eat dead mammals and birds, as well as the fly larvae that feed off carrion, but most importantly they bury it with their own eggs, giving their young something to eat. Pictured above are two…
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In Maria’s Basement
I’ve mentioned the Maria Mitchell Association on Nantucket in my previous posts without explaining much anything about it. In four decades connection with the island, I’ve been to their observatory, science center, and library many times. A friend of the family wrote the most recent biography. So I naturally assume that everybody knows who Nantucket-born…
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Mud Cells
Two summers ago, a Black and Yellow Mud Dauber wasp built her nest in the Back 40 (inches). A new generation of these large, black-bodied wasps with yellow legs emerged in June of last year. This year I had one inside the house. Not here in Brooklyn, but at the family house in Massachusetts. This…
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Banding Osprey, Part II
Osprey chicks can be too old to band, because as they near fledging, they may jump off the nest site prematurely to get away from the human who has climbed up to borrow them for a moment. If they aren’t actually ready to fly, this can lead to broken wings. This one, however, was a…
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Banding Osprey, Part I
Last year, there was one fledged Osprey (Pandion haliaetus) chick on the east end of Nantucket. Numbers had been dwindling in previous years and last year was pretty much bottom; there just weren’t any fish to be had, so the adult Osprey were traveling to hunt at the other end of the island, but that…
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Seen on Nantucket
I was on Nantucket at the beginning of the month and it was cool, overcast, and/or rainy much of the time I was there. One afternoon, however, the sun poured out.The “beard” of a bearded lily. A polypore mushroom of some kind in the State Forest.In the Highlands of Scotland some years ago, I got…
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The winter beach, the small house
Two of my favorite things. The blurb on Charlton Ogburn, Jr.’s The Winter Beach (1966) says it’s “timeless,” but no, it’s very much a piece of its era. Ogburn traveled down the east coast in the early 1960s and he was mostly bummed out at what he found of the post-war boom. The environmental movement,…
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Never the same beach twice
The Cliff along Nantucket’s north side is a time-and-tide whittled slice through the north side of the terminal moraine, the long pile of glacial till left over when the ice retreated. Long Island was made the same way, and its north side has cliffs like these, too. The cliff here is eroded by the sea,…
Backyard and Beyond 