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Bird of Many Feathers
Doing some quick internet searching, I see that songbirds can have from 1500-3000 individual feathers. Swans can have as many as 25,000.
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Sunday Sermon
“Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. They’re allowed to take only a knapsack and a little cash with them, and even then, they’re robbed of these possessions on the way. Families are torn apart; men, women, and children are…
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Robber Flies & Dragonflies
A Holcocephala genus gnat ogre. Hey, I don’t make these names up, I just report them. Like the examples below, these are robber flies. Ommatius genus. Robber flies hunt and kill “insects of many orders” according to bugguide.net. In this case, a fly victim.Genus Efferia. Another captive fly.Here, the prey looks like a tiny wasp.…
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Wasps II
These are roughly in size order:Great Black Wasp. These pictures do not convey the sheer giganticness of this species. They are big and fast, really moving between flowers. They hunt katydids, crickets, and grasshoppers for their young.The Great Golden Digger Wasp. Crickets, katydids, grasshoppers, beware.European Paper Wasp. Know them by their red/orange antenna. I’ve seen…
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Wasp Ascendency
Cicada-killer, whose name speaks for itself. A husky wasp that provisions its young with paralyzed cicadas, so really it’s the larva who kill the cicadas…Unknown. Possibly one of the Grass-carrying wasps of the genus Isodontia.Another Isodontia, possibly. Members of this genus use grass in the construction of their nests and prey on crickets and other…
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Raptor Wednesday
This is a young male American Kestrel. He brought some bird prey to this balustrade recently, and left it on the right hand corner. You can just see the lump. It was there for more than an hour as he flew here and here, perching here and there as well. Now, this building has been…
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Flower Fiends
Bumble/Tiger Swallowtail.A true bug, meaning an insect that sucks its food, and an unknown bee. Another bee I can’t identify.Don’t forget the butterflies, fools for flowers, too. One of the sulphurs, I’ve never been able to distinguish them.Whoa, Nelly! Look at the patterning on this Oblique Streaktail (Allograpta obliqua)! Going to work on getting a…
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Genus Ardea
Two juvenile Great Blue Herons (Ardea herodias) and a Great Egret (Ardea alba) were hanging out at the same “water” in Green-Wood recently. Ardea is Latin for heron, herodias is Greek for heron. Alba is white. The egret was scarfing down small fry with abandon. Never saw either of the herons make a strike. (“Heron”…
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Underland
The Old English word unweder means bad, bad weather, a storm or tempest “so extreme that it seems to have come from another climate or time altogether” writes Robert MacFarlane in Underland. Exploring the rapidly shrinking ice of Greenland near the end of his new “deep time journey,” he’s in the thick of this uncanny…
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Same Oak, Different Gall
Looking a bit like mushrooms, these galls on the leaves of this white oak in Green-Wood are the results of yet another Cynipidae gall wasp, Phylloteras poculum. Mine was the third iNaturalist report of this species. I tracked the species down on bugguide.net. Bugguide.net doesn’t have an image of the actual (tiny) wasp. So this…
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Backyard and Beyond 