Starting out from Brooklyn, an amateur naturalist explores our world. "The place to observe nature is where you are."—John Burroughs
European Paperwasp and Two-spotted Scoliid Wasp.
Clouded Sulphur (or is there some orange in there?) and something something skipper.
Another skipper, in the background, along with an Common Eastern Bumblebee and a striped sweat bee.
Monarch and more Common Eastern BBs.
Two species of metallic sweat bees.
Monarch and skipper.
From the top clockwise: European Hornet, Cicada-killer Wasp, Eastern Yellowjacket, all slurping up lilac sap.
Good gravy!
A blue-form female Familiar Bluet, I think. About three blocks from the nearest water body. The edge of this parking lot was weedy– more recently every bit of greenery was removed. But it’s already sprouting back…
Anyway, the damselfly turned out to be laden with cargo. These red things are water mites, hitching a ride. This is an example of phoresy, “a symbiotic relationship in which one organism transports another organism of a different species.”
And look here, on this Hypena genus moth. More parasitic mites!
More on moth mites.
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Trump’s “acting” agency heads, like tennis player Chad Wolf at Homeland Security, are promising to nationalize the secret police tactics being used now in Portland, OR, where masked CBP troops are kidnapping people off the street. I was not being hyperbolic when I said CBP, an agency born of racism, is America’s version of the gestapo.
It can happen here. It is happening here.
Non-biting midge bigger than your average fly,
characteristically holding his forelimbs out in front. The feathery antennae are reminiscent of some moths. Probably cold, letting me get the phone camera close up.
The National Wildlife Foundation has a county-level guide, the Native Plant Finder, to native plants that support caterpillars. Why caterpillars? Because they are esentially the foundation of the food chain for song birds. Even the seedeaters that come to your feeders for seeds and suet in winter feed their young caterpillars. Caterpillars are relatively soft as insects go, and they are simply packed with fats, proteins and carotenoids, which are vital for avian development and feather pigmentation.
The stats on caterpillar consumption are mind-boggling: a single nesting pair of Carolina Chickadees will feed their young ones 6000-9000 caterpillars before fledgling, meaning over sixteen days on average. After fledgling, nobody has counted, but fledged Chickadees get feed for up to three more weeks. It’s rare to see Carolina Chickadees in Brooklyn.
Here’s another: a Wilson’s Warbler pair were closely observed. The male carried food to the nest 241 times a day, the female 571 times a day. For five days. That’s a minimum of 4060 caterpillars, if each trip was one caterpillar’s-worth. Often as not there are more than one caterpillar in the parent’s bill, at least in places un-assaulted by chemical warfare and invasive species.
Bobolinks: parents brought food to nest 840 times a day for ten days in a row.
A UK study of ten different passerines found an average of 259 food trips to nest per day.
Audubon’s Plants for Birds is another good source for information on plants to grow in your area. Many of the plants sold for yards and gardens are the WORSE thing you could do for local food webs. After all, they’re for sale so people can make money. Pretty and exotic is sterile. Ornaments and decorations, it turns out, are actively working AGAINST nature.
“Bird-friendly” shade grown coffee? Nope, not if the shade is being thrown by eucalyptus trees, which are often used because they grow fast… and provide shade. But they provide next to nothing for the birds because they provide nothing for local insects.
(In California, where they went crazy for eucalyptus a century ago, precisely one species of insect has adopted to living off these exotic and invasive trees in that time.)
It’s not just biodiversity. The kind of plant makes a lot of difference. Some keystone species are disproportionately productive for food webs. “A landscape without keystone genera will support 70 to 75 percent fewer caterpillar species than a landscape with keystone genera, even though the keystone-less landscape may contain 95% of the native plant genera in the area.”
The single best insect-friendly species to plant in 84% of U.S. counties are white oaks and their relatives. They support some 934 caterpillar (butterfly and moth) species nation-wide. Compare with tuliptree (21 caterpillar species), black gum (26), Sweetgum (35), persimmon (46), and hemlock (92). In the mid-Atlantic states, white oaks host nearly 600 species of Lepidoptera larvae.
Do you know how many species of butterfly in their larval state live on Buddleja, the famous “butterfly bush” much touted as food for butterflies, in North America? One out of the 725 species.
But wait! Of the 511 caterpillar species found on oaks in Chester Co., PA, 95% of them fall to the ground when they’re fully grown. They don’t pupate in the trees themselves, probably because they want to escape predators. Instead, they burrow into leaf litter, dig themselves into the ground, and even chew their way into rotten wood. So a stately oak in a patch of turf grass, well-mowed and sprayed, with hard-packed soil, tidied up every fall of all those rich leaves, is a desert. Put in native shrubs and/or flowers like wild ginger, foamflower, and woodland phlox. Or keep the leaf “litter.” (Change the name of litter to “natural fertilizer” and/or “habitat.”)
All data and quotations taken from Doug Tallamy’s new book, Nature’s Best Hope, to be discussed tomorrow. A book for your neighbors, I’m guessing.
Caterpillars at Backyard & Beyond.
Under a thin layer of ice, two true bugs in the Crescent Water. The first is a water boatman, the second a backswimmer.
Not all of the pond was iced over. Aerators keep donut holes of water ice-free, and the edge along one side of the pond was also open. This Eastern Phoebe was making short forays over the water and sometimes dipping into it. Not, I think, to drink, but to plunge for prey! Just a guess, considering there are obviously insects to be had in the cold water.
This Phoebe (presumably the same one) seems to have been around all winter. So has this male Belted Kingfisher. He is also leery of people, but a lot noisier about it. Making dive after dive for little fish, usually not hitting, but obviously striking enough to be stick around. (Yesterday I saw him gulp down a goldfish.) The Kingfisher hovers like a Kestrel over the water before plunging, something I’ve never seen before this winter.
There are still, after all these years, parts of Green-Wood I’ve never been. I came across this massive black cherry only recently.
It was after a big wind and bits of the scaly bark and branches were scattered about.
The mature bark is very different from the younger stuff from way up there.
Turning over the loose pieces on the ground, I found a Nabis genus damsel bug.
And a springtail! (And something even smaller I can’t tell what).
Eumenes wasp mud nest pots.
There were a dozen of these mantid egg cases in this patch of Rhus aromatica, the same spot I found the mud nests in.
If there were sheep about, I say this was a bit of wool with a medium-sized marble in it. I am, however, hoping it’s some insect I know nothing about making it through the winter. It was too high up in a tree to touch. Those are pine needles stuck to it.
Bird skull.
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Good luck to Great Britain as it leaves the EU and the bandits sharpen their knives, the very day the craven cowards of the GOP join the fascists of the GOP to confirm that Trump can attempt to steal the 2020 election any way he can.
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres…
At the tips of a young oak, small round nestled in filamenty nests. Galls (not Gauls, pace Casesar) with exit holes. Big question in the wonderful world of galls is: what emerged, the gall inducer or the inquiline (parasite)?
Not just on the bud tips.
Possibly something in the Andricus gall wasp genus. This is a large genus. As I understand it, each species makes a unique gall. These tiny wasps stimulate the tree by chemical commands and the tree grows a gall in response. The tree is being hijacked, but not really damaged (?).
But wait! I’d originally thought this tree was a red oak but could it be be a bur oak? Will have to double check this.
If it’s a bur, then Andricus quercusfrondosus sounds like a possibility. This source notes that this species creates autumnal growths for the the agamic or asexual generation. Yes, gall wasps, which were once all called gall flies, alternate an asexual generation and a sexual generation. According to the cited piece, the agamic or sexual generation isn’t known for this species.
More complications: found a similar if not same gall on a definite red oak, which will be the subject of another day.
To summarize: galls are complicated.
A venerable sassafras (Sassafras albidum) in Green-Wood. May be the state record holder for tallest: 69′ in 2016. 138″ in diameter at 4.5′ height.
More interestingly, at least to me, is the question of age. Does this pre-date the establishment of the cemetery in 1838? If not it must come close.
Sprouting adjacent. Sassafras is a clonal organism.
You would be correct in your supposition that this magnificent bark is habitat. Just think of all the life forms that have lived upon and beneath it!
I was lucky enough to see this in my orbit of the tree. A piece of bark over a foot long had fallen off and on the inside was this Eumenes wasp mud pot nest.
Stay tuned for more sassafras tomorrow. Yes, more!
Over the weekend I found four large silkworm cocoons. This one was hanging in an oak.
This one was on the ground. I turned it over to see the other side. Coin is just over an inch in diameter. There was an oak overhead….
Another in a willow oak (at perhaps half a mile’s distance from the first oak).
Another, same tree, higher up.
As it happens, this — the tree with the two suspended cocoons — is the same willow oak where I found one of these last year. The tree has at least three cocoons now. I spotted one of them attached to a vine in November.
It has since fallen to the ground, to blend in with the leaf litter in the bulwark of the tree.
Now, I think these are all from the big Polyphemus Moth, Antheraea polyphemus. Oak is one of their food plants. Falling to the ground seems a normal part of the wintering process. I must look into how the caterpillar manages to wrap leaves around its cocoon.
***
“Crime committed brazenly is over time redefined as something other than crime. It is entertainment, and then it is autocracy, and then it is too late.” Sarah Kendzior has been quite good on the Trump organized crime family and its Republican enablers, members, and co-conspirators. Here’s a list of the members of congress who are advancing the crime agenda in the petrie dishes of kleptocracy that are Trump’s properties.
By now you know that the repellent Rudy Giuliani has claimed he works as Trump’s henchman for “free” (a gift unrecorded by Trump, yet another ethics violation) while taking payments from sleaze ball Lev Parnas (indicted and singing like a canary turd), who in turn is paid by a Russian oligarch named Firtash, who, in the Putin-oligarchy, is up to his ears in brute corruption, too.
Backyard and Beyond 