Prospect Park
-
March Turtles Beat the Hares
The Lullwater still had ice on it, but Prospect Park Lake itself was completely free of the stuff. I saw about a dozen turtles sunning themselves yesterday afternoon. These animals spent the last half year or so down in the mud at the bottom of the Lake in brumation, a form of dormancy that isn’t…
-
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.…
-
Architecture
Now that most of the leaves have fallen, it’s a good time to start looking for bald-faced hornet nests. These two samples are from Prospect Park. These nests are abandoned each year, so they are harmless in winter. Wasp queens are the only ones who survive the winter, and they do it underground, or deep…
-
Walking Tour
“To a person uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a walk through a gallery filled with fine art works, nine tenths of which have their faces turned to the wall. Teach him something of natural history, and you place in his hands a catalogue of those which are worth turning around.”…
-
Prospect Park Colors
The other day, I went looking for the Vesper sparrows that had been reported in the park. Fenced-in sections in the southern end of the Long Meadow, the area converted into the Ball Fields by Robert Moses, are providing excellent habitat for sparrows these days. The grasses are going to seed and there are still…
-
Fall birding
Northern parula, Parula americana, a species typically found at the top of trees. But this south-bound migrant was hungry, and was flitting around at eye-level in Prospect Park before it descended to wrangle with a caterpillar on the ground. An unleashed dog chased it away. The green mantle on the back is an excellent field…
-
Buckeye
A Common buckeye, Junonia coenia, working the aster in Prospect Park.
-
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…
-
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…
-
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 