mthew
-
Monarchy Nears
Prepare for a week of Monarchs! Plant more milkweed! There are around 25 caterpillars in the patch pictured, and they have done an epic job of defoliating these plants down to the bone. All that milkweed energy is going into metamorphosis. (Unless it’s going into a Spined Soldier Bug!)
-
The Experiment
For more than a century now, the planet has been under chemical attack. At first, we directed this attack at insects, then at humans, then again at insects, and now again, by default, at humans. It was war, literally and figuratively. Now it is war of another sort, a profit-driven war against life itself. I…
-
Jump Off
The meadows are a-twitching with these big Differential Grasshoppers (Melanoplus differentials). *** DC phone numbers for Senators who are on the fence about Kavanaugh. Why yes, some of these are Democrats: Not in their state? They take money from every state, and around the world too, and they make laws for the nation, so not…
-
The Last Picture
A close-up of some moss through a 10x loupe. “At the scale of a moss, walking through the woods as a six-foot human is a lot like flying over the continent at 32,000 feet. So far above the ground, and on our way to somewhere else, we run the risk of missing an entire realm…
-
The Footprint
“It happened, one day about noon going towards my boat, I was exceedingly surprised, with the print of a man’s naked foot on the shore, which was very plain to be seen in the sand. I stood like one thunder-struck, or as if I had seen an apparition; I listened, I looked round me, I…
-
Ischnura ramburii
Wednesday is traditionally Raptor Day here at B&B. Damselflies are quite the airborne predators, so…. This one is an immature female Rambur’s Forktail (Ischnura ramburii), spotted at Jamaica Bay with numerous others of her species. I’ve seen a male away from the Bay, in Green-Wood once. Several of the Ischnura genus have orange colored immature…
-
Remains of the Night
Something got this bat, or else something else (a car?) got it and then something ate of it. I’m struck by the delicate structure of the rib cage. *** The entomologist and curator Alex Wild said this on Twitter yesterday after the disaster in Brazil: “The loss of the Brazilian National Museum to a preventable…
-
Monarch Labor Day
Monarch caterpillars famously withstand the toxic sap of milkweeds. They themselves become toxic to predators by eating milkweed. This gaudy circus look is the opposite of camouflage: it’s a warning! But they don’t want to drown in the sap. This caterpillar chewed away at the stem, or petiole, of this leaf to cut the plant’s…
-
There Were Whales
D. Graham Burnett’s The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century is a whale of a book. He traces the… evolution (?) of whale science from the cutting room floor of factory ships by scientists who were more or less creatures of the industry, flensing their way through interesting collections of…
Backyard and Beyond 