Fieldnotes
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Cactus Flower
I usually see the Prickly Pear cactus (Opuntia humifusa) out at Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge about this time of year, but I haven’t been on the A train in a while. I heard recently that a patch was discovered in Upper Manhattan, which is at the other end of the A train. This flowering specimen,…
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Tiger Swallowtail
The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) is the largest butterfly in the northeast (wingspan can reach 5″). I saw my first of the year over the weekend in Massachusetts.This is a male. Females have much more blue on the hindwing. There’s also a dark female form which is more common as you head south.
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Of course you realize this means war
Half a dozen mosquito bites over the weekend.
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Snug as a snail in a snail
I like the idea of one gastropod hanging out in the shell of another. You’ve seen this before: the Queen Conch shells I lugged home — not from the Caribbean, but from Dead Horse Bay’s eroding landfill — provide an excellent shelter for terrestrial snails. Cepaea nemoralis, the Brown-lipped snail. A new squatter, as an…
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Bait?
A Great Black-backed Gull scavenges a Horseshoe crab. This is the last full moon of the Horseshoe spawning season. Gravid females can lay tens of thousands of eggs during the season, making successive trips to shallowly bury their eggs at the high tide line. Very few of those eggs become adults. I’ve seen one estimate…
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Skates
Sun-dried, the remains of a skate repose on that great depository of all things, the beach, Jamaica Bay branch. This may be the Little or Common Skate, Leucoraja erinacea. Cartilaginous like their relatives the sharks, skates reproduce by laying eggs, unlike their near look-a-likes the rays, who bear live young. Rays also have longer, more…
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Arthropods
Hey! a) I got close enough to this slender inch-long damselfly to capture some detail, notably the broken stripes on the thorax, and hence b) I declare this to be a male Fragile Forktail (Ishnura posita). The pollen pack on this bumblebee, foraging in cluster of sumac flowers, is going to make some baby bumblebees…
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Green-Wood
Fringetree. Galls clustering on a hickory. The leaves of one of that cluster of Common Persimmon trees. A Great Egret being photogenic as always. Water Lily in the Valley Water; there were only a few blossoms yet. American Lady butterflies amid a horde of honey and bumble bees.
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7 Spotted, 13 Spotted
Pupating larva, I assume of the Seven-Spotted Lady Beetle (Coccinella septempunctata), adults of which who were all around Four Sparrow Marsh: A species introduced from Europe to eat aphids. Another commercially available aphid eater is the Convergent Lady Beetle (Hippodamia convergens), which is exported out of California:Like the Multicolored Asian Lady Beetle, this is also…
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Question Mark?
The question mark on a Question Mark butterfly (Polygonia interrogationis) looks a little more like a semi-colon. These and their cousins the Eastern Commas are also called Anglewings more generically because their wings don’t have the rounded shape of most of our butterflies. This one was slurping up Viburnum nectar in Brooklyn Bridge Park recently.…
Backyard and Beyond 