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When I was a child, we called them locusts. They appeared sometime between when we started to worry about the water level in the well and when we started to worry about going back to school. They were huge – well, huge for grasshoppers, anyway – and dust-colored, and they jumped like gunpowder-propelled novelties out [...]

Unrest and revolution in Egypt has caught the international headlines this week. Mubarak’s ousting has left a military regime holding the reins until the country can catch its collective breath and organise elections in 6 months or so. My visit to Cairo was abbreviated and to attempt any sort of outing with binoculars and camera [...]

Pity the poor damselfly.  Damselflies make up the practically-ignored suborder Zygoptera in the order Odonata and are overshadowed by their flashier evolutionary cousins of the suborder Epiprocta, otherwise known as dragonflies.  Seriously, can you name a single species of damselfly off the top of your head?  Yeah, until recently I couldn’t either.  In fact, studies [...]

The Wallkill River National Wildlife Refuge actually spans two states, New York and New Jersey, and has a host of species that call it home.  When Seth, Stella, and I visited on Sunday, flush from finding the birds we had been seeking, the sun had finally come out and it was late in the day [...]

Folks might remember that last year I did what I grandly called an Anti-Global Warming Big Year, the idea of which was was to see as many species as possible while burning as little carbon as possible.  To offset the carbon dioxide released from a flight to California and back from my home base in [...]

Monarch Butterflies, as they do every fall, are heading south for the winter.  Along the coast one can see pretty big numbers of them, especially on days when wind out of the north carries them to the shore.  I am always amazed by long migrations, but it is usually birds I think of when considering [...]

Two of the more recognizable butterflies of the northeastern United States were kindly enough to pause in front of my camera lens of late, the Monarch Butterfly (Danaus plexippus) and the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus).  Both are bigger butterflies than the skippers I’ve recently seen, and both are strikingly colored and rather common, but, [...]

As I mentioned in my previous post the last visit I made to Forest Park was relatively birdless but the bugs did their best to make up for the lack of birds.  In particular, the area around the reclamation pond was quite buggy, with the water and numerous wildflowers creating quite the habitat for everything [...]

Monday was a well-spent vacation day.  Why?  Well, Charlie was in town and we went birding at Jamaica Bay!  I’ll leave it to Charlie to tell the tale of the birds we saw and didn’t see and stick to three of the insects that we spotted: a fly, a butterfly, and a cicada.  Charlie also [...]

Way back when I started my Anti-Global Warming Big Year I decided that if I flew somewhere and stayed there for more than a couple of days I could count the birds I saw there provided I offsetted the carbon that the flight produced.  So I counted a bunch of birds in California that I [...]

One thing that I like about this time of year is bugs.  Sure, migration is over and the hordes of wood-warblers are busy breeding further north but bugs, well, bugs are everywhere, and they tend to be easy to photograph, that is, if you don’t mind photographing whatever bug it is you happen to come [...]

I have never in my life been more glad not to be a bug.

In Albany’s Pine Bush recently Daisy and I came across a pair of moths that were, we assume, mating. Neither of us had ever seen such a moth, nor had we ever seen any moths mating so it was, um, interesting. Anyway, I sent some pictures over to Patrick and he quickly responded with an [...]

During this past summer whenever I was outdoors and the birds weren’t showing I took pictures of the dragonflies that I spotted. I’ve managed to identify some of them but I am certainly not an expert. As I’ve mentioned before, they are “a serious identification challenge and figuring them out is an interesting, though frustrating, [...]

Earlier this month I found and photographed this spider in my grandmother’s backyard. I finally got around to trying to figure out what it was today by searching obsessively through web page after web page. Well, I think I mostly figured it out, narrowing it down to its family, the Agelenidae, more commonly referred to [...]

Common Milkweed (Asclepias syriacea) is an easily recognizable plant with a range that encompasses virtually all of North America east of the Rocky Mountains. It is one of over 140 species of milkweed, the genus Asclepias. Its common name comes from the white fluid released when the plant is harmed, and the scientific name derives [...]

Just like butterflies, I honestly don’t know much about dragonflies. They look cool, they don’t bite people except maybe if you are handling them, and this past Sunday one was flying around, trying to catch and eat the deerflies that were trying to eat me and my fellow birders. Here is the coolest picture I’ve [...]

As a person who is still relatively new to the world of birding I feel that I have made some pretty big strides in figuring out the wide variety of birds that I see and hear. I might not identify them all but I definitely manage to put a name to the vast majority that [...]

The acquisition of a new field guide is always a joyous occasion, signaling either an impending journey or impending answers to old questions. By the latter, I’m referring to those unclosed cases that accumulate any time a nature lover ventures outdoors armed with a camera but not a clue. As you can imagine, my digital [...]

The biodiverse expanse of the Everglades is a lepidopterist’s delight, serving up really sensational butterfly species. However, the non-avian critter that really caught my attention during my trip to Loxahatchee NWR was the big, beautiful Lubber Grasshopper. The Eastern Lubber Grasshopper (Romalea guttata or Romalea microptera) is fairly common throughout the southeastern United States, particularly [...]