mthew

Monarch butterfly egg. Unlike the Question Mark eggs I serendipitously photographed last week, these are relatively easy to get close to. (Well, this egg-hunting does require being on your hands and knees in the broiling sun….) Here’s just the shell of another.

Buffalo Treehopper/Sticocephala bisonia This one may be the same or a similar species.

Or, who’s got the chicken thigh?

The day after the Great Kestrel Massacre, there were two of these little falcons visible from our apartment. (I only managed to photograph one.) A few hours later, I first heard then spotted this youngster in Green-Wood, around the Old Chapel Lizard Hunting Grounds. This female was there too. I don’t know if she’s a…

The day after the Red-tailed Hawk kill I documented yesterday, I returned to the scene to see if any more feathers of the prey had come down from the tree. There were these secondaries. These primaries (flight feathers). And these unmistakable tail feathers. The Red-tail’s lunch was a male American Kestrel. Here’s another male, seen…

A Red-tailed Hawk flew into this tree with prey in talons. The local Northern Mockingbirds went bananas. Three of them yelled and dove at the big hawk over and over. The hawk didn’t pay them any mind. Too busy eating… a woodpecker? Urp! No, not a woodpecker. A lot of the prey’s plumage got stuck…

A Question Mark butterfly. Laying eggs on the underside of an elm leaf.

Bembix americana Bembix something Bicyrtes ventralis. Ten feet up from the fiddler crab flats seen in Tuesday’s post, three species of Bembicini sand wasps were scoping out the terrain. The tiny strip of beach at Bush Terminal Park is habitat for these nesters in the sand. One more species, Microbembex monodonta, should start showing up…