mthew

At lease 46 people were killed in the region when the remnants—the remnants, mind you—of Ida poured through Wednesday night. So far, that’s a higher total than in Louisiana. Historic amounts of rainfall resulted in people drowning in their basement apartments; and the NYC subway system shutting down. Physics: a hotter atmosphere is a wetter…

The sheer awfulness of Susan Collins rings out in her speech on her vote for alleged rapist Kavanaugh “In short, his views on honoring precedent would preclude attempts to do by stealth that which one has committed not to do overtly.” Not that I’m going to spare the execrable Joe Manchin, the only Democrat to…

These two species are usually seen in flight, meaning barely seen at all as they zip around, but I found two Wandering and one Spot-Winged perched in the same patch on a recent overcast morning.

A Long-tailed Giant Ichneumenon Wasp (Megarhyssa macrurus) female. She is sniffing (antennae-ing) out the hosts of her young. She uses this long ovipositor to tuck into dead wood after the larvae of Pigeon Horntails (Tremex columba), another good-sized Hymenopteran. I’ve only seen a Tremex here in Brooklyn once. Here are two males. They were nearby,…

I have lately seen a few things on social media about the importance of street trees. The various “services” they provide: shade, clean air, beauty. Nobody ever mentions that even a tree stuck in a hardpan pit surrounded by concrete and pissing dogs is also an ecosystem, a microcosm. Ants running up and down the…

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Following up yesterday’s Common Aerial Yellowjacket, here’s a more common-around-here Bald-faced Hornet devouring a skipper. Everything but the wings. The big mandibles of the Dolichovespula can scrape up the wood fibers they use to build their paper nests, and then dismember prey lickety-split. I see Bald-faced Hornets hunting all the time, but this is the…