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Lady-like
The Catalpa trees — both the Northern Catalpa (C. bignonioides) and the Southern (C. speciosa) are found in the park — are ladybug magnets. The large heart-shaped leaves are often sticky, perhaps from the excretions of aphids, a favorite ladybug food. Right now, the nymph stages of the lady beetles, these small but frightful looking…
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Fish
Gasping at the surface near the pier, this fish was in trouble. Or so I thought. But it seemed to successfully dive back into the deeps, so it might have been feeding at something I couldn’t see on the surface. About 14″ long: what is it? And here, soon after low tide way up the…
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Silver-spotted Skipper
1. The “silver spot” on the Silver-spotted Skipper (Epargyreus clarus) is on the other side of the wings and is more of a white splotch to the field observer. 2. “Rumba” is a variety of rose.
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Tern, Tern, Tern
A Common Tern (Sterna hirundo) at sunset on Pier 5. The last of the days light is shining right through the nares or nostrils of this bird’s bill. Common Terns now nest on the old piers on Governor’s Island: 100 chicks were banded there last year. Tomorrow, the It’s Your Tern Festival will be celebrating…
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Animal Sex
It turns out that one of the best ways to tell species apart is to examine their genitals. There’s an incredible variety of forms of male and female sex organs, even within the species gathered together in a genus, and so for years biologists have been separating, for example, beetles that otherwise look rather similar,…
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Bird Sex
Bird sex is usually a very brief affair, a quick connection between cloaca. They may make this contact many times over the course of a day, or three, but the actual hookup itself is a matter of seconds. Sperm is transferred without benefit of a penis (except in the case of ducks and a few…
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Some Pollinators
It’s National Pollinator Week, but we should be thanking the bees — and other pollinators — every day for the work that they do. And fighting like the dickens the exterminationists of the agribusiness/pesticide complex.
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Red-tailed Hawks
Spot the three young Red-tailed hawks in this nest.
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Backyard and Beyond 