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Some Books
Francis Hallé’s Atlas of Poetic Botany is delightful. It’s a botanist’s record of encounters with remarkable life forms, tropical plants that walk, listen, mimic (like a chameleon, yes), among other things. I hadn’t known that rubber trees were native to the New World. However, they can’t be grown plantation-style in the Amazon because if they’re…
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More Butterflies
Common Sootywing. A small black skipper, the only example seen on this day in Green-Wood, where all these butterflies but one were seen. Rather better pictures than our last encounter, when there was also only one to be seen. The way the fall of light accents the scaly edges of this particularly brightly-spotted individual is…
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A Bigger Cowbird
I don’t know if this is one of the Brown-headed Cowbird chicks I saw in the last couple of weeks. If not, it would be the third one I’ve sighted this summer. I’d never seen one before this summer. As in the other cases, I heard this youngster calling for food before seeing it or…
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Swallowtails
Mating Black Swallowtails. Papilio polyxenes. When I first saw this, I though it might be a hanging dead butterfly, all torn up from the vicissitudes. Always double-check the anomalies!Interestingly, this pair attracted another male, if not more than one over the ten to fifteen minutes I was there. (Black Swallowtails are all over.)The second male…
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Raptor Wednesday
There is no mistaking a mature Red-tailed Hawk, at least in this part of the country. And there is no mistaking the sounds of song birds upset by the presence of such a hulking predator. Four Northern Mockingbirds were fidgeting in this tree around the hawk. On a nearby obelisk — cemeteries! — a Chipping…
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Spiders
Of all the creepy-crawlies, spiders might be the hardest to photograph. They’re small and the slightest breeze moves their webs. Autofocus pretty much refuses to recognize them. Manual focus is tricky, too. This preposterous creature is in fact a Spined Micrathena. The spiny adomen may deter predators; the un-spider-like shape may do something similar. To…
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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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