Prospect Park
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Spotted Mystery
A storm-toppled tree in the Ravine in Prospect Park made a natural bridge for squirrels and chipmunks before it was sliced up. The horizontal trunk was also being used for a plucking station, as these remains attest. The main predators of birds in the park include other birds, raccoons (but mostly of nestlings), and cats.…
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Hedge Apple
The fruits of the Osage Orange are falling. They are sap-sticky and alien-brainy when fresh.
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“Why are there so many dragonflies in prospect park this year?” asks a Googler. Are there? Populations rise and fall through the years, depending on weather, food supplies (adult dragonflies eat other insects), disease ~ the usual ebb and flow of expansion and contraction amid animal and plant populations. (Only we humans have managed to…
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Nuts! Conkers
The Horse-chestnut, Aesculus hippocastanum, a native of Eurasia, is a relatively common tree in the city, having long been a popular ornamental. This is its seed, or conker. The Yellow Buckeye, Aesculus flava, meanwhile, is a native of the Ohio River valley and other Appalachian valleys, and is seen much less frequently in the city.…
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Nuts! Beechnuts
General Anthony C. McAuliffe Week continues….We have two kinds of beech trees, genus Fagus, in our midst: the European F. sylvatica and the American F. grandifloria, with numerous cultivars, including cut-leaf and copper, and several subspecies to mix it up even further. Sylvatica was often planted in parks, where the smooth gray bark attracts the…
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Osage Orange
“Don’t sit under the Osage Orange with anybody else but me.” Maclura pomifera, a.k.a. bois d’arc, bodark, hedge-apple. There are several in Prospect Park, but this one in the Nethermead is the park’s finest example. It should be dropping its cargo of softball-sized fruits any second now. Folk belief has these “apples” used to scare…
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Prospect Park: A Study in Green
Earlier today at the Binnen Water. You can de-Impressionism this by clicking on it to open it to a larger size.
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Prospect Park’s Litter Mob
Once on a tour, which I wouldn’t recommend, with “Wildman” Steve Brill, we bushwacked through a condom-littered section of the woods in Prospect Park, and someone said, sotto voce, “Damn, these are the safest woods I’ve ever been in.” Neighbor and blogger Marie Viljoen has been organizing a team of volunteers to clean up the…
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Turtles in trees?
Come to think of it, I’ve now seen two turtle shells in crotches of trees in Prospect Park. One was just within hand’s reach, the other required a friend and a stick to bring it back down to earth. Considering the number of turtle shells I’ve seen in the park, two in the trees is…
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Prospect Park Summer
One of the parent swans had just nearly kicked the ass of yet another unleashed dog.I think they were hanging outside their lamp-post nest because it was even more blazingly hot inside. But, I didn’t stick around long enough to ask, or even to focus all that well.
Backyard and Beyond 