mthew

Lots of arm-waving from this male Thin-spined Jumping Spider/Tutelina elegans. This may be the female of the species. One of the running crab spiders, I think. Another look at the Variegated Ground Spider/Sergiolus capulatus.

Common Milkweed/Asclepias syriaca. Note the yellow thing at 9:00. That’s half a pollen packet or pollinia. A pair of pollinia are connected into a saddlebag-like pollinium. Here’s a pollinium attached to a Brown-belted Bumblebee’s foot. It’s possible to get too many of these things attached to you, weighing you down. (This page details the hazards…

More acts of unintentional pollination by various bees and such in celebration of Pollination Week.

In lieu of not being quick enough to photograph the first adult Monarch I saw this year, on Wednesday, June 21st, here’s a detail of a mural on a new school. I did see some caterpillars on May 21st and 22nd.

Angel of Milkweed wonders where the hell the pollinators are… But I managed to find a few in our cool, ashy June. These mating… Oxybelus wasps, I think… are simply covered in pollen, but will they land in other flowers to spread it around? Pollinator Week

Above Bartel-Pritchard Square at the western-most corner of Prospect Park as I waited for the light to change. The Square is actually a traffic circle, and rather tricky for pedestrians. I heard the bird(s) before seeing them. Could only tell in the camera later that I had at least one female and one male crisscrossing…

“This used to be a sand box,” says a guy in his sixties or more after he asks if there are any fish in there. Mulsant’s Water Treader/Mesovelia mulsanti Physa bladder snail. There were a few goldfish, but there were a lot more American Bullfrog/Lithobates catesbeianus tadpoles. And a gigantic adult. The tiny lily pond…

Whatever this is, it’s all over the place. And I’ve found pretty much all the lady bugs to be had in NYC in it recently. Seven-spotted. Fourteen-spotted. Asian (larva stage). An interesting variation on the Two-spotted. (For a hot naturalist moment, I thought I had an unfamiliar species.) Variegated. Not sure whose larva this is.…

Summer Fishfly/Chauliodes pectinicornis flailing about. Four wings awkward. Seen in Staatsburg like the rest of the insects below. (Brooklyn has few Megaloptera.) Atymna querci, no common name. There are innumerable craneflies, most impossible to identify from photos, but this Tipula longiventris is quite distinctive, not least with its large size, 3.5cm long. A mayfly. Turns…

Female. First representative of Enallagma geminatum I’ve seen in Brooklyn. (And the only one only for Kings Co. on iNat.) Hanging out at the crest of the hill southwest of Sylvan Water in Green-Wood. Look at every bird, I always say, you never know what you’ll end up seeing, and now I must expand this…