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All Summer Long
An unfamiliar bird sound called this one to my attention this week. It’s a fledgling American Robin. Still very much undercooked, the bird was clamoring for food.It may never have seen one of my kind before.I obviously can’t be eaten… or can I be?Yes, it can fly with those wings.A couple of days later, some…
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Fireflies!
Fireflies retreat during the day, tucking themselves out of the way. The common Photinus seems to prefer the underside of leaves. Not sure which species this is, but it’s a tree-hugger. There were fourteen of them on this part of an old oak’s trunk. Fireflies are another family of insects that are in decline. The…
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Snoutless
Here’s what an American Snout, Libytheana carinenta, looks like normally. This one was spotted in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, near some particularly veteran hackberry trees. They lay their eggs on hackberries.Here’s another Snout spotted at Transmitter Park along the East River recently.It’s missing its “snout.” Actually, this appendage is not really a snout at all. These…
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Cicada Weather
These Neotibicen annual cicadas are more often heard than seen. When I do come across them, they’re usually dead. While their exoskeleton exuviae can be found gripping tree trunks under ten feet from the ground, the adults are usually way up in the tree, hidden by all that foliage. (You’d hide too, if giant wasps…
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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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Backyard and Beyond 