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Leaf-cutters
Here’s a Megachilidae family leaf-cutter bee. Even if you’ve never seen one, you may very well have seen their sign.These solitary nesting bees gather pollen on the underside of their abdomens, unlike bumblebee and honey bees who pack it around their hind legs. They are fabulous pollinators and generally quite uninterested in you. They’re too…
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Ebony Jewelwing
Flying moth-like on broad dark wings, their abdomens metallic green or blue, depending on the light, Calopteryx maculata are probably the most recognizable of our damselflies.Males are pictured above. These and the females below were spotted around the Cross River in the Ward Pound Ridge Reserve in Westchester County. I’ve not seen them in NYC*.The…
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Question Mark
There are two comma or anglewing butterflies of the Polygonia genus we see regularly here in NYC. You can tell them apart when their wings are spread, but it’s subtle.But they often perch upright. So the namesake comma mark on the hindwing is the tell-all. Of course, this is hard to see in the field!The…
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Hopper, Cricket
Good sand-colored camouflage here.Here, not so much, but then crickets are usually tucked away someplace, heard much more often than seen. Grasshoppers and crickets (and katydids, etc.) are in the order Orthoptera, the “straight-winged.”
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Dusky
A duskywing, perhaps Horace’s (Erynnis horatius), the other option being Juvenal’s (E. juvenalis). All very classical, no? The similar species overlap around here, with Juvenal’s the more northerly and Horace’s the more southerly.
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Yellow Bear
Yellow Bear caterpillar (Spilosoma virginica), sometimes known as the Yellow Wooly Bear. Compare with one I photographed last year: they come in a great range of colors. According to Wagner, the pale early instars are gregarious, the older instars wonder lonely as a cloud. (I may have hopped-up Wagner’s description a bit.)
Backyard and Beyond 