Brooklyn
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Et in Arcadia Ego
Still sparrow, moving fly.A White-throated Sparrow, no doubt recently arrived from the north. In NYC, dead birds can be reported to NYC Audubon. This database is intended to track window- and building-strikes. This bird was found in the middle of McGolrick Park, but I noted it anyway. It’s All Hallows, the Day of the Dead,…
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Memento Mori
Found in the shadowy gully between window and screen of someone else’s fourteenth story apartment, a veritable mausoleum of desiccated Diptera and at least one Hymenoptera. I’m just finishing up my costume for tonight: I’m going as a landfill full of Halloween garbage.
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Just Wow
Common Buckeye, Junonia coenia.
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Weekend Update
It’s been absurdly warm. Lots of trees are nowhere ready to shake off their leaves. Bumblebees, which can take 60 degree temperatures, you might expect to still be around, but some of the smaller bees were out and about, too. This metallic green bee of the Agapostemon genus, for instance. But it’s late October: there…
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Raptor Wednesday
We were eating dinner in Park Slope, near a known hole-in-the-cornice Kestrel nest site. After dinner, we noticed a Kestrel making sorties for bugs up a side street. The bird returned to this perch twice and was still there as we left the scene.
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Fall-ish
Yesterday was the first day it felt like fall, more than three weeks past the equinox. And then it dropped to 41 overnight. This morning the radiators were gurgling. Locally, not many leaves have turned yet, but these, fallen from a Nyssa sylvatica (Black Gum, Black Tupelo), are in the mood.This Eastern Phoebe was a…
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Familiar Bluet
Enallagma civile, the last damselfly of the year? This picture was taken on 9/24.This one on 10/6: tandem flight and egg-laying in Green-Wood’s Sylvan Water. I assume the larvae will overwinter.
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Insects
Harmonia axyridis, the Multi-colored Asian Lady Beetle, is known in the UK as the Harlequin Lady Beetle. “Harlequin” is a better common name than MALB, which is a mouthful and has a whiff of racial baggage to it, particularly when added to invasive. This one was one of two spotted in Denmark, the only lady…
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Bombus Away
After a lingering slog of humidity, things have gotten cooler and drier here in the Borough of Kings. Today’s high is forecast to be 69, not the most optimal for insects. Their season is passing. I saw this bumblebee yesterday working a chicory, of the few flowering plants in Sunset Park now. The bumble was…
Backyard and Beyond 