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Of Wings and Stigmata
Found the remains of a dragonfly on a Brooklyn sidewalk recently. Possibly a Common Green Darner, one of our most common species. One of the hind wings was still in pretty good shape.Pretty good, but at 40X showing some wear and tear. These two shots are hand-held through the microscope, so not as great as…
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Mammal Monday
Yes, it was hot this weekend. A little house-crazy, I ventured into Green-Wood early Saturday morning. My shirt was plastered to me in no time, and this in the shade before 9 a.m. But everybody’s got to eat. In my case, I need the sustenance of life, like for instance spotting this munching squirrel. And…
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Wind At The Back
Just next month, a new edition of Lyall Watson’s Heaven’s Breath: A Natural History of the Wind. The title is iffy and I question its dependence on the Gaia hypothesis for its overarching theme. This seems par for course of Watson, who was a prolific popularizer of science who verged into the paranormal and New…
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Mind Your Bees Wings
I rarely get a chance to illustrate the four-wingedness of Hymenoptera. The pair of wings on each side of the thorax mesh together in flight, making them look like one wing per side. This Eastern Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa virginica) is the biggest local bee species. And bigger makes things easier to see. One wing set…
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American Dagger
There is so much going on “in” an oak tree. The biologist E.O. Wilson has written that you could spend a lifetime voyaging like Magellan around a single tree, discovering all the interrelated life associated with it. Quercus is definitely one genus where this applies very well. This British study found 284 insects associated with…
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The Bee’s Tongue
Never mind the knees, how about those tongues? Check out the tongue between the down-turned antennae. (Those antennae, by the way, are hugely important sensory organs: they can touch, taste, and smell.) There are short-tongued and long-tongued bee species.This leaf-cutter bee seems to be tasting this stem.This one explored numerous leaf edges. The tip of…
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Raptor Wednesday
Look, up in the sky! It’s a… oh, let’s cut to the chase, comix book fans. It is a mature Bald Eagle. A pair have been nesting in the area for a couple of years now. (Remember, in 1974 there were no breeding pairs in New York State AT ALL. In 2017, there were 323…
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Another Snout
This makes four American Snouts, Libytheana carinenta, I’ve seen so far this year in Brooklyn. That’s four times as many as I’ve ever seen. This one, unfortunately, was dead on the sidewalk.
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More Exuviae
An emergent damselfly next to the husk of its former, aquatic life stage. When they first emerge as their adult, flying form, they don’t have much color. Their wings unfurl and harden off, like their new exoskeleton. They can’t fly immediately.When they can fly, they will sometimes take shelter in trees, bushes, etc., to finish…
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Two Degrees
“What happens if one changes a systems’s parameters — the temperature, the weather, the climate? What will collapse and what will endure? Who will live and who will die?” A two-degree rise in global mean temperature, which now sounds optimistically low for the results of global warming this century, may be compared with effects of…
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Backyard and Beyond 