Fieldnotes
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Zabulon
Poanes zabulon,the Zabulon Skipper. A male. You really have to get up close and personal to the skippers to tell them apart. And that usually takes some optical enhancement, although if you should find yourself sitting quietly next to a lot of pollinator-magnets they may be too busy to pay you any attention.
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Doves on the Roof, Aloft If Not Aloof
On a glass roof. A not bad illustration of the anisodactyl pattern, the three toes forward/one back arrangement of some bird feet. Passerines, the song birds, also known as perching birds, have this layout. The members of order Passeriformes make up half of all bird species. Doves, however, even with the same toe-pattern, are members…
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To Explore Strange New Worlds
These are the neighborhood voyages of this blog… for the 50th anniversary of Star Trek.
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Wood Duck
A female Wood Duck (Aix sponsa) through several layers of wild. There were at least seven on the Pools recently. Two of the males. All the males were out of their harlequin breeding feathers, in eclipse plumage, and looked like abashed clowns who had trashed an orphanage after wiping off the greasepaint. It looks like…
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Cocktail Hour
Is this too much John Cheever-John Updike, drunken wasps getting it on? Above are Thread-waisted Wasps (Eremnophila aureonotata) mating on that pollinator-magnet mountain mint (Pycnanthemum). Like many wasps, the adults eat nectar, but feed their larvae flesh. (OK, now we’ve entered Stephen King territory) These provision their young with caterpillars. Blue-winged, a.k.a. Digger Wasp (Scolia…
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Two of Our Smallest Butterflies
Eastern Tailed-Blue (Cupido comyntas). Nice to see the pale blue here, for it usually perches like this:This is a male. Females are browner. I must say, my field guide suggests a much darker blue, but the harsh sunlight here is bleaching everything out. The tiny trailing “tails” can be seen emerging just below the lower…
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Color of Light
Same Red-winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus), same camera/settings, different light.
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Backyard and Beyond 