mthew

Saturday night, dog-sitting. Take the dog out around 10pm. There’s a loud noise coming from the barely visible pond area down at the beginning of the driveway. First I’ve heard this sound. I record it. I listen to several frog songs online. Ah: Gray Treefrog/Hyla versicolor. The next day I can hear a few more…

Eastern/Gray Ratsnake Complex (Complex Pantherophis alleghaniensis) And another, rather bigger. But with a rather abbreviated tail.

Not one, but Two Red-shouldered Hawks soaring over Staatsburg. A Red-tailed Hawk in the woods out back. Picture through the screened window…

Almost the same place two days later, I looked back while walking the dog just before 6am… (And another sighting 45 minutes before we go to press this morning…)

Fragile? Well, that’s the common name of Ischnura posita, but they’re tough enough for most NYC habitats. Another Fragile Forktail, recently emerged. Eastern/Ischnura verticalis. Currently upstate, where I spotted an Aurora Damsel/Chromagrion conditum for the first time. More upstaters: Lancet Clubtail/Phanogomphus exilis Azure Bluet/Enallagma aspersum Skinning Bluet/Enallagma geminatum Springtime Darner/Basiaeschna janata A good perch is…

12:49 12:56 1:20 1:27 1:35 1:39 A paralyzed caterpillar will be stuffed in here with one of the wasps’s eggs. I observed for about a dozen more minutes to see if that would happen while I was there, but I didn’t see her again. (Another iNaturalist user has captured this.) More about this introduced species.

(With one eye, anyway.) *** I wrote a feature on Black Mask magazine, the birth of the hardboiled detective, and the Klan they fought in fiction.

Tufted Globetail Sphaerophoria contigua While adults flower flies eat pollen and nectar, their larvae eat aphids. A bit slug like, the larvae. No idea which species this is. This Bare-winged Aphideater Eupeodes perplexus was probably ovipositing right next to dinner… My first sighting of this species, and this was the best overall photo I could get she…

Grackle joins in…

From the Falcon Cam at 55 Water Street in downtown Manhattan, May 11th. A baby Peregrine at about a week’s age. In falconry, an unfledged chick is an eyas. This was May 5th, a day or two after hatching. Back to May 11th. Parent atop chick and…uh… Why yes, that is the head of a…