mthew
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Cats!
When a body meets a body coming through the… Apiaceae. Black Swallowtail caterpillar fit to pupate. The Asteroid, AKA Goldenrod Hooded Owlet. A reprise of the Common Buckeye caterpillar. Five were seen in the same small patch. The blue spines! Our old friend the Monarch. On the same day, two days ago, a female was…
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Raptor Wednesday
Summer is quiet when it comes to raptors, unless you have American Kestrels breeding down the street.But now fall is in the air. This Red-tailed hawk perched on a #BrooklynKestrel landmark recently. One of the local falcons, now days generally heard more than seen, was not happy about it. The kestrel’s alarms calls got me…
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Hairy Nature
Close up, nature starts looking really, really hairy. Take a look at the green shoots of plants, the exoskeletons of insects. Hairs and spines are everywhere.Common Buckeye larva.Bumblebees, it goes without saying.Other bees, too. Look at these bristly thighs, Writes Dennis Paulson in his natural history of Dragonflies & Damselflies: “Because a chitinous exoskeleton does…
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Climate Strike Prep
This Friday is the beginning of a week of the Global Climate Strike. Some resources: Fridays for Future youth activism training program. NYC student organizing guide. Climate Strike educator toolkit. Climate Strike Arts Kit, from whence this David Solnit fire-extinguisher logo comes. People’s Climate Movement NYC. Petition for teachers, educators, & faculty. Here’s some history…
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Wilding
Some good news! Isabella Tree’s Wilding: Returning Nature To Our Farm has been published. This is a revelatory story of a family’s abandonment to natural processes of their losing-proposition farm in the clay-laden Weald, some 44 miles southeast of London. Tree is a very fine writer. It’s worth reading this just for the great way…
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Nine-Spotted Lady Beetles
Do you remember when the Flatbush Gardener released Nine-spotted Lady Beetle larvae in his native meadow garden? Coccinella novemnotata is the New York State insect, but it is almost non-existent now in the state. In fact, the species is hardly to be found anywhere in the east. Cornell’s Lost Ladybug Project has been working to…
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Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright
I’m missing the egg stage, but otherwise here’s the run: The first few instars of the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail mimic bird droppings. This one was on the nearly horizontal surface of a magnolia leaf, right out in the open. Finally saw one! The caterpillar is green in youth. Or is that middle age? Old age,…
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Webworm Days
Fall Webworm caterpillars have been everywhere. This one was on a raised bed on the sidewalk next to the local high school last week, with barely a tree in sight. I don’t even remember where this was, back in July. Here’s yet another, along the 5th Avenue Green-Wood fence. Uh-oh! You see, everybody knows the…
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BioBlitz Notes
Birds are hard to capture with phone cameras, the standard way people enter information on iNaturalist. I led two bird groups of Macualay Honors College students on the BioBlitz Saturday. This is the only picture of a bird I put into iNaturalist. We tallied birds seen the old fashioned way, with paper and pencil. Macaulay…
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What Came To Light
Moths spotted during the Macaulay Honors College BioBlitz in Green-Wood cemetery Saturday night: Black-bordered Lemon Moth (Marimatha nigrofimbria). Explicit Arches (Lacinipolia explicata). The Gem, or Gem Moth (Orthonama obstipata). Idia genus. Fall Armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda). White-speck (Mythimna unipuncta). Same individual, showing the effects of different light regimes on the subject. Greater Black-letter Dart? Opinions differ…
Backyard and Beyond 