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Sparrow ID
Unaccountably without my bins, I snapped this with my camera’s zoom feature. That’s feature, not actually a zoom lens, unfortunately. Sure, it’s starting to look like it came out of Blow-Up, 1966, highlighting the unreliability of all representation. But, you will pay particular attention to the shortness of the tail. And could you convince yourself…
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Butterflies
American Copper, Lycaena phlaeas. Another name for them is Flame Copper. They are small and vivid.Common buckeye, Junonia coenia. This one kept leaping ahead of us on the path and required some very careful stalking. From F. Schuyler Mathews, Field Book of American Wild Flowers: Being a Short Description of Their Character and Habits, A…
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Island Bugs
Ah, summer, season of buzzing and flying and biting! The insects are out in force. OK, there’s really not that much biting, per se. Seen last week on Nantucket: One of the green metallic bees, genus Agapostemon, also known as sweat bees, on chicory flower. Note the big bundles of pollen around the legs. A…
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City Habitat
Now that the dog-day cicadas have started to emerge from their years underground, their enemy, the cicada wasps, emerge as well. And since our street trees have roots, which is what the cicadas live on while during their nymph stage, so too do our streets have these wasps.Yesterday, walking in Brooklyn Heights, I found a…
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Spiny-leaved sow thistle, Sonchus asper, in a Columbia Street tree pit. A non-native species, but well-settled. Judging from my dad, whose hair I inherited, this is what my head will look like some day.
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Cicadas Emerging
I was away from the city for a week, so the cicada I heard on Henry Street this morning was my first of the year. It’s the quintessential sound of summer. Previous cicada-themed posts: Part I, Part II, and Part III.
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Figs
The other day I was trying to explain how fig trees work. It is insanely complicated. I don’t mean the many horticultural varieties of figs people grow in their yards, like the ones pictured above, seen recently on a garage parking lot on Union Street. These develop without pollination; they are parthenocarpic. I mean the…
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Systems of change
“[…] it is often not easy to assign insects to precise categories because there are so many species and their morphological, behavioral, and genetic differences frequently tend to overlap or intergrade. Often the best we can do is estimate degrees of relationship and/or distinctness and assign them to hypothetical groups as information becomes available. As…
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Back 40 Grasshopper
Less than half an inch long, this little grasshopper leapt out of the Back 40 greenery when I started to water and clung to the plastic (yeech!) fence.
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Backyard and Beyond 