insects
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Bluets & Forktails
Azure Bluet (Enallagma aspersum) male.Familiar Bluet (Enallagma civile) male. Familiar Bluet female, one of three color forms for this species. When odonating, you will quickly see that it’s males who patrol the water. Females are often munching away elsewhere, and come down to the water to pair up and lay their eggs in the wet…
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Ladybugs
Two Spotted Ladybug, Adalia bipunctata.Wait, there are four spots, or two tiny dots and some squarish sides? This is one of the melanistic forms of the species. First one I’ve seen this year, on a tree in between Third and Forth Avenues. Others seen since. It’s definitely insect season.
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Odonata Season
I saw my first living dragonfly outside my windows on Saturday. I’d seen a couple of Common Green Darners here and there during the last few weeks, but spotting an unidentified dragon over 6th Avenue was the real start of the summer flying season for me. On the same day around Green-Wood’s Sylvan Water, I…
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Mud Castles
Wasp nests, provisioned with spiders and other delicacies for larvae to eat. Vintage ’17, awaiting the warmth of ’18. I had a Black & Yellow Mud-dauber Wasp under the balcony at my Cobble Hill apartment. The brand new adult wasps emerged in June.
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Sappy
A Blue Atlas Cedar (Cedrus atlantica)A line of sapsucker holes. About 3/4″ deep, through the bark.These holes are chiseled out by, in our parts, the Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (Sphyrapicus varius), who drinks the sugary sap and snaps up any insects also attracted to the sweet stuff.
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Flies
They get no respect, the two-winged insects known as flies. The biters, bloodsuckers, shit-eaters, in-flesh laying parasites, maggot-spawners. Ooooog, you say, why are you doing this to me on a Sunday morning? Well, at least they’re not Republicans. There are an estimated 17 million flies for each and every human. We’d be drowning in excrement…
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Pulp Nonfiction
All right, then, I will admit an obsession with these Bald-faced Hornet nests. The scraps of paper blown down from one that I bought home recently revealed at least two tiny invertebrate species making their home there after the wasps were undone by the year. At 10x magnification, you really begin to see the tiny…
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Snow Hat
Within a short distance of the 25th St. entrance to Green-Wood, there are five of these big Bald-faced Hornet nests.A pair in neighboring trees. And yesterday, I found some of the paper of one of them strewn about. Now that’s what I call wrapping paper!
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Revealed
Paper can be strong stuff, but it’s all relative. The exterior coating of wood-pulp paper made by Dolichovespula maculata hornets, who scrape dead trees (or fence posts!) with their mighty jaws, has been stripped off by the weather. Horizontal layers of comb are revealed within. And still-capped larvae probably all killed by the freeze. The…
Backyard and Beyond 