A low-flying Great Egret about to go over 5th Avenue, presumably on the way to Sylvan Water.

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I don’t know who this bee, but this bee sure is workin’. Another Margined Calligrapher Fly.

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Lots of Virginia Spring Beauties/Claytonia virginica, including some intensely pink ones. After a stormy night, with temps rising into the 60s, there was a little bit of pollination going on. An Andrena genus mining bee… is it the fabled Spring Beauty Miner? Stay tuned. Figure the pollen on this Margined Calligrapher Fly is Virginia Spring…

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Everybody’s gone snailin’/across the USA. Well, a dozen of us, anyway, gathered for last week’s Earth Day Snail Safari in conjunction with David Colosi’s exhibit Snaileidolia at Open Source Gallery. [Link includes a reading of David’s snail fiction and a intriguing globe-spanning discussion on Zoom.] Above is a Common Periwinkles (Littorina littorea) found by one of…

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Look at plants through various magnifications (10x in the above pic), and you start see a lot of hair. As it happens, this is the underside of a fresh Mockernut Hickory leaflet. These are particularly hairy; in fact, Carya tomentosa is named for its leaflet undersides being covered in dense short hairs (from the Latin…

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The small, legume-family (Fabaceae) flowers of Eastern Redbud (Cercis canadensis) are nectar mines. Here’s a long-tongued Golden Northern Bumble (Bombus fervidus) going for the gusto. Here’s what I think is a Brown-belted (Bombus griseocollis), even though the “belt” isn’t very brown. And an Eastern Carpenter Bee/Xylocopa virginica.

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Bufo bufo, Buteo buteo, Vulpes vulpes, Gorilla gorilla, Rattus rattus, Bison bison… I do love a double-barreled binomial, also known as a tautonym. Anyway, snowbirds will know the Anhinga as a bird of Florida. They don’t generally get north of North Carolina. But with fascism on the loose in Florida, everybody’s leaving… here’s one in…

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A Red-tailed Hawk glides down down with its wings hunched up. I though it was a plastic bag in the air at first. Then it landed in this Eastern Cottonwood and voila, the local American Kestrel male let up a war-cry and came calling. The Red-tail soon departed, bearing a stick in talons for a…

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Female American Sweetgum flowers, smaller than a dime so far. These mature into green, golf ball sized fruit balls, eventually drying to dark brown. Ailanthus buds. Male Eastern Cottonwood flowers. Red is a popular color in spring time. The pigment anthocyanin protects tender plant parts: buds, new leaves, and young fruits from the the UV…

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Revisiting this large crane fly. Rather prominently on the left side of the fly is a halter (also spelled haltere). The creature has two of them. This is a big fly, so they’re really quite prominent, but every fly has them (plural: halteres). They can be paddle-shaped, drumstick-shaped, even a bit bowling pin-shaped. Here they’re…

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