The Lower Merion School District plans to raze a wooded area — home to towering tulip poplars and red and white oaks — to build practice athletic fields for the nearby Black Rock Middle School. The grounds of Oakwell, an estate on County Line Road in Lower Merion, have greenery that includes high rhododendron bushes
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By Bernard BrownJust past midnight on Friday, April 26, a common greenbottle fly sleeping on a leaf was immortalized by Navin Sasikumar in iNaturalist as Philadelphia’s first observation for the City Nature Challenge 2019.
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by Bernard BrownImagine you’re a pipevine swallowtail butterfly flying around the rowhouses of southwest Philadelphia. You look like a swatch of velvet. On top, your wings are black toward the front and an iridescent electric blue towards the back; underneath, they flash an array of bright orange spots as a warning to predators. You hatched at
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by Bernard BrownWhat’s your favorite sign of spring? Flowers blooming? Bees buzzing? Raptors hurtling into the water, talons first, emerging with a wriggling fish to rip apart back at the nest? Spring has returned to the Delaware Valley, and with it our local ospreys.
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by Bernard BrownIn a room crowded with dusty reference books and bugs—some dead and pinned neatly in glass-topped boxes, others, like the stag beetle grub, alive and growing slowly on a diet of rotting tulip tree wood—assistant entomology curator Isa Betancourt, of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, adjusts her iPhone stand, brushes
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By Bernard BrownDawn over the Delaware River painted clouds rose and orange in the frigid morning air as three participants in the Philadelphia Mid-Winter Bird Census stepped out of a hatchback.Keith Russell, Shawn Towey and Patrick McGill stood at the base of the driveway for Pulaski Park in North Philadelphia, binoculars in hand, and confronted
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Drive from New York to Washington, D.C., and it might be hard to imagine that there was once anything there other than cities and suburbs. Today a vast landscape of brick and asphalt, concrete and lawn stretches up along the I-95 corridor, broken only occasionally by marsh, farmland or forest. You might wonder what grew
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In 1970, the City of Philadelphia closed off the East Park Reservoir at the edge of the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood. A gate blocked the ramp up from Fairmount Park. “I grew up in Strawberry Mansion, and the reservoir was used by the community as a recreational space,” explains Tonnetta Graham, president of the Strawberry Mansion Community
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On July 16, a female ruby-throated hummingbird drank from a coral honeysuckle flower at the edge of Tacony Creek Park. We know this because an iNaturalist user with the handle “digitalmirage” took a picture of the bird in the moment before it hummed away. “Recently I’ve been obsessed with hummingbirds,” explains Savannah McHale (a.k.a. digitalmirage), who
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Abrood of fledgling kestrels—America’s smallest falcons that are adorable even as adults—peer through the front of their cage, which sits at the top of shelves filled with animals on the mend. “These are ones we raised from fallen nestlings,” explains Michele Wellard, assistant director of the Philadelphia Metro Wildlife Center. Wellard is careful to make
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There are two letters from readers sitting on my desk, each one tugging at me, competing for my mood and mindset. I may be an optimist, but I’ll start with the more negative of the two. It comes from a reader in Oreland, a response to editor’s notes I had written about the ill-conceived idea
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