invertebrates
-
Question Marks
Polygonia interrogationis , the Question Mark butterfly. The wings need to be closed to see the mark in question. I think it’s more of a semi-colon. The similar Comma (Polygonia comma) has the “comma” mark but not the dot. Mud-puddling. Everyone does it, but butterflies are so conspicuous they get noticed doing it. Insects need…
-
Various Insects
Polished Lady Beetle. The gloss on these things! You can see the trees overhead reflected in the elytra*.Red-banded Leafhopper. You must get close to this little one to see this wild pattern.Invasive European Wool Carder Bee. They hover very much like flies and are quite territorial. All over now, they were first detected in New…
-
Three Common Brooklyn Damselflies
In my experience, these are the three most common Brooklyn damselflies. Eastern Forktail male. Beware that Rambur’s Forktail and Furtive Forktail males also have variations on this green thorax/blue end segments coloring. Fragile Forktail male. The broken green lines on the thorax, upside down exclamation points in this case, are unique. Not sure where this…
-
More Insects
The Common Sootywing. The Kaufman guide says “flight is slow and close to the ground” but I beg to differ with the first characterization. This was about the tenth I’ve seen in various places before I could get a photo.Black Swallowtail, another mover, if not shaker.This is a Great Blue Skimmer, another case where the…
-
Sheet Music
A bridge and a stream. What more could Organ Pipe Mud-dauber Wasps (Trypoxylon politum) need than shelter from the rain and a source of their building material? Well, spiders, of course. These wasps paralyze spiders to feed their young inside these mud-nests. Here’s an interesting observation: Tufted Titmouse and Downy Woodpeckers breaking into these to…
-
Brilliant Disguise
This hairy, burly flier certainly suggests a bumble bee head-butting her way into the nectar and pollen.But, taking it from the top, the characteristic eyes of a fly let us know that this is a bee-mimicking fly. In addition, the two wings literally point to Diptera, the order of flies, named after their two wings.…
-
Start Your Week Right
An Eastern Kingbird perching near invasive honey bee hives.But not hunting.Doing… some calisthenics?Whoa… Forcing up a pellet…With that done, the bird returned to zooming amongst the bees.This is a wad of exoskeleton bits. (Much like good french fries, insects are crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside, but instead of a surface layer…
-
Odes
Spot-winged Glider, in a rare perch. They can spend hours in the air.Blue Dasher male, quite common and frequently perched.Eastern Pondhawk male.Male Painted SkimmerThis damselfly is peculiar. I can find no matching ID for it, and both iNaturalist and bugguide.net remain silent to my queries. I think it may be a maturing andromorph (that is,…
-
Darning (?)
Common Green Darner dragonflies (Anax junius). This is a migratory species, one of the first seen in the spring and one of the last seen in the fall as they move up and down North America. Male is grasping the female as she oviposits, laying her eggs in the lake in Woodlawn Cemetery. Not all…
-
Biodiversity Day
Well, the picture of the aphid on the street oak tree leaf that feeds the ladybug was too blurry to use, but you get my drift… . We certainly merit an extra post today for biodiversity. This is the husk of the larval stage of the Winter Firefly (Pyractomena borealis). As firefly maven Sara Lewis…
Backyard and Beyond 