September 2021

We’re going in reverse order. About a month ago, I posted pictures of Long-tailed Ichneumenon Wasps. The female was ovipositing deep in a hickory tree. Her target: the larvae of this creature, a Pigeon Horntail, which I saw last week. The Pigeon Horntail lays her eggs in old wood. This happens to be another hickory,…

A soft rain of pieces of cucumber magnolia fruit reveals a tree, thickly cloaked in big, thick leaves, busy with Red-eyed Vireos, Catbirds, four different species of thrush. Across the road, the noisier fall of hickory husks point to squirrels at work.

I abandoned the absurdly high-salaried and beyond-bullshit dot-com world just weeks before the attack on the World Trade Center in September, 2001. The cafeteria in our office building, Cross & Cross’s magnificent Deco-fantasy Twenty Exchange, was on the top floor, so those who went in early for breakfast saw it from on high. I saw,…

For those keeping count, I now have 1055 verified species recorded in Kings County on iNaturalist. “Verified” meaning they aren’t casual observations, which are reserved for cultivated or captive life-forms. Many of our urban plants were planted, meaning they’re casual observations by iNaturalist’s standards. Even a tree planted a century ago is still considered a…