Nantucket
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More snails
I found this little specimen in North Andover, MA. I think it’s Oxyloma retusum, the blunt ambersnail. This is a fairly similar animal, but I’m not sure it’s the same species since the shell is not glossy or amber. What do you think? I found this one on Nantucket, MA. Is that snail turd there?…
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Spiders
Spiders are one of the mainstays of life in my Brooklyn backyard, which I persist in calling the Back 40 (inches). The following samples, however, were photographed in Massachusetts recently. There are some 3400 spider species in North America north of Mexico. Some are web builders, making the classic orb web; some make sheetwebs. Some…
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May beetles
There are some 300 species of May beetles, genus Phyllophaga, in the U.S. and Canada east of the Rockies. We also call them “June bugs.” The first three photos are all of the same species, night visitors to Nantucket, MA, last week. They are rather cumbersome fliers. This one still has a bit of wing…
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Field Trip: Tiny flowers
A chickweed, methinks. Some kind of violet? Both of these were found at the Lily Pond, in town. The ground was squishy: the water table all over the island was high. Which leads me to this: A sphagnum?
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Natural Object: Whelk Egg Case
You may recognize this if you live on the east coast of the U.S. south of Cape Cod: it’s a whelk egg string. Here in the NYC region, we have two types of big whelks, the channeled and the knobbed. The knobbed is the state shell of New Jersey and Georgia, should you ever be…
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Evening Chorus
A week ago on Nantucket at twilight I wandered down past the MSPCA’s driveway, which is also a road, of sorts. It’s unpaved, and runs through a bit of piney woods past someone’s great-tracks-of-land spread, complete with big red barn and, um, llamas. At one point, you come across an emphatic stone marker noting that…
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Field Trip: Beetles!
Found this handsome creature on the beach on Nantucket, where it was not doing well with the shifting, treacherous, sisyphean sands. The good folks at Bug Guide identified it for me as Tricrania sanguinipennis. Like the oil beetles we found at Jamaica Bay, these parasitize ground nesting bees. Euphoria inda, the bumble flower scarab, found…
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Field Trip: Nantucket
Harbor seals on the Jetties, Nantucket Harbor. I went up to Nantucket, MA, last week, taking a bus up to Hyannis and then the “slow boat,” the ferry, across the Sound. For a couple of years now, I’ve noticed osprey over Hyannis harbor and wondered where they nest. On the return trip, this time on…
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Natural Object: Cedar-Apple Rust
Many of us look to the stars hoping for new discoveries. Obviously, there’s plenty to find out there. But some people seem to think everything has already been done right down here. Ha! Last week I was on Nantucket Island, off the coast of Massachusetts. Thirty miles at sea, it’s a damp and very windy…
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Field Trip: Moths, Spider
From inside the house. And running along the ground. There actually seem to be a lot of spiders running on the ground up there.
Backyard and Beyond 