wasps
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Sphex
For the budding naturalists I met in the park while photographing these wasps, which of course I couldn’t remember the name of. There were about half a dozen on this milkweed, more than I’ve ever seen at once. This is the Great Black Wasp (Sphex pensylvanicus). The adults, like many of the big wasps, are…
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C/CKW
The Cicada Killer Wasps (Sphecius speciosus) are out and about now, collecting pollen at flowers to eat, stabbing cicadas for their young…I’m not telling, but here’s a Dog Day cicada (genus Tibicen), more heard than seen by we ground-huggers.The two wasps pictured above are males. They’re smaller than the females. Here’s a female, scare-the-horses-ginormous, patrolling…
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Black and Yellow
Black and Yellow Mud-Dauber (Sceliphron caementarium). Remember when they spent a winter nesting in the Back 40? And then bundled out of their mud huts after about 9 months entombed in hard mud like ancient Egyptians?
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Papery
The beginning of a Bald-faced Hornet (Dolichovespula maculata) nest. It would have gotten to be the size of a football (American) if the construction process hadn’t been interrupted.Fallen to the ground from a tree for some reason.You bet I approached it gingerly.
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Emergence
“Paging Dr. Kinsey, paging Dr. Kinsey! Gall wasp emergence on Henry Street…” Before he went into human sexuality in a big way, pride-of-Hoboken Alfred Kinsey was a specialist in gall wasps, a vast and largely unknown kingdom, at least to us non-specialists. Back in early February, I posted about two species of gall wasps on…
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Cycles
If you’ve been following this blog a while, you’ve seen this before. Not this photo, not this example, but similar. For nature follows cycles, and so too does this blog. Pieces of the past summer’s Bald-faced hornet (Dolichovespula maculata) nests, now abandoned by the generation of 2012, get blown out of trees this time of…
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Trick
Those fake cobwebs some people insist on garbaging their homes with this time of year turn out to be as effective as real cobwebs in trapping dust, bits of leaves, and, as I noticed on Congress St. the other day, a dozen wasps.Vespula maculifrons, the Eastern Yellowjacket. Black antennae, remember, are good for IDing the…
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Underside and inside
European paper wasp, Polistes diminula. Through a window. It was a cold morning, the first of the nascent fall, and this individual was hardly moving, waiting to warm up with the sun. This European import, introduced to the U.S. only in the late 1960s and now wide-spread, has markings similar to some of the yellow…
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Habitat
Brooklyn Bridge Park’s horticulturalist Rebecca McMackin told me recently that she consciously works to create habitat. The proof is in the animals: Spot-winged glider (Pantala hymenaea), a new species for me. A reader of this blog, in private conversation, noted how the carrion beetle thing yesterday was a little queasy, but I personally find these…
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Corner Pocket
A fairly representative New York City tree pit. “Pit” is definitely the word here. The hard-pan — calling this sterile-looking misery “soil” would be an insult — looks like something you’d find in a draught-ravaged desert. And you can imagine the gallons of poisonous dog piss that have been poured in over the years. It’s…
Backyard and Beyond 