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Location (1)
Here’s a fine essay on paying attention, listening, noticing, watching, the natural world. A cicada sounds as I type this. Two mornings in a row the only sound around 5 a.m. has been a cricket outside. The boom of bombastic car stereos, the revving of little men’s big engines, and tear and crash of garbage…
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Raptor Wednesday
First off: we’ve had near daily American Kestrel sightings or hearings here at the H.Q. But today’s specimen sightings come from Green-Wood Cemetery. A female atop what may be the largest obelisk in a cemetery full of them. (Curious how Christians went in for this paganism in Victorian times.) Now here’s a male atop the…
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Locations
The meadow at Green-Wood. With outlaying outposts. This area has been hopping, throbbing, buzzing, stirring with life this summer. They got rid of the monotonous deathscape of grass, hard to maintain on this slope anyway and bought in the Rubeckia, Monarda, Solidago… and with these came the animals. As clear an example of “if we…
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So Many Insects, So Little Time
Agapostemon splendens, obviously. Looking like something out of 1950s science-fiction, the Tersa Sphinx. Shining flower beetles. Spittlebug nest. Sumac leaf wrapped around… something invertebrate. There are leaf-folders and leaf-rollers; perhaps a tortricid moth caterpillar did the work here. There’s another in the background, too. Pondhawks are known to be voracious predators. This female was eating…
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Paulson on the Odonata
Dennis Paulson’s new Dragonflies and Damselflies: A Natural History‘s is a great introduction to odonating. Paulson has written the standard field guides to American/Canadian odes as well as dozens of journal papers on odonates. The pictures in his field guides are too small; that’s these guide’ principal fault. But consider: there are 461 species to…
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Blue-winged Wasps & Flies
Scolia dubia, the Blue-winged Wasp or Blue-winged Scoliid Wasp, with two i’s. “Two eyes” may be a good mnemonic for this one with the two orange marks on their reddish abdomen. When they are gathering nectar, they’re easy to spot. But I’ve seen two bunch of them patrolling what I thought must be a courtship…
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Viceroy vs. Monarch
Limenitis archippus. Danaus plexippus. Viceroy pictured first. The black band across the hindwings is the most obvious field-mark difference. In the Southwest, however, this band can be faint or even missing. The Viceroy is also smaller than the Monarch, which is one of our largest butterfly species. This Viceroy was seen, along with a couple…
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A Miscellany
Indian pipe in fruit. A spider wasp of some kind, found dead on this car. The pearly paint really shows up in detail; I bet its production is toxic as hell. The Pompilidae family of spider wasps has some 5000 species in it… There are a number of fungi that stain wood various colors. Denim…
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Emergence
On Saturday, your correspondent stumbled upon a cicada emerging from its larval husk. The folded forewing has sprung from the exoskeleton, but the hindwing remains inside. The left hindwing, on the other side, was free soon enough, but this right one would remain inside the tight confines of the husk for the entire time. From…
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Catbird
Migrating, breeding, molting, migrating. While Gray Catbirds are resident year around along the Atlantic Coast up into Massachusetts, the vast majority leave NYC and head south come the fall. Before that, they molt into their basic, non-breeding plumage. This one in Prospect Park is in the midst of shaking out the old and growing in…
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Backyard and Beyond 