northeast-flora-and-fauna

Here's someone I don't think I've seen before, or if I did I was unable to get a picture of it. The latter is probably more likely, since my field guide says the  Carolina Saddlebags  is "common", and also mentions that saddlebags don't perch much but instead spend a lot of time zipping around in the air. Despite zipping around, these largish bright red dragonflies are likely to get your attention. They get the "saddlebags" part of their name from the large (in this case red) basal spot on the hind wings, which made it look like (to someone familiar with horses) the dragonfly had saddlebags . (In actuality dragonflies have few possessions, and thus no need for a saddlebag with which to carry them.) There is a very similar saddlebags dragonfly, the Red Saddlebags, that's occasionally seen in the southern tip of New Jersey. Even though this dragonfly would be out of range in Hillsborough, there are reasons to believe this is the Carolina Saddlebag...

A couple weeks ago at the Dukes Brook bird blind at Duke Farms, I didn't see birds but saw "something weird" going on in the water. I'd see something large repeatedly emerge from and submerge into the water. It took a while for me to convince myself this was due to one/more Common Snapping Turtles as opposed to some odd largish fish ( European Carp ?) activity. Once I convinced myself this was snapping turtle activity, I still wasn't sure what was going on. Was a snapping turtle attacking something, either another turtle, or bird, or even something like a beaver or otter? Well, there was no sign of blood in the water, and given a snapping turtle's ability to inflict damage it seemed unlikely that one would be involved in a fight for any length of time without one combatant or another getting wounded. I'm now of the belief that I was seeing Common Snapping Turtles mating in the water, surfacing for breath and positioning. And I've heard that snapping t...

Though most of the time my problem with taking animal pictures is getting an animal that doesn't want its picture taken to cooperate and stay still long enough for me to aim and focus. But once in a while the opposite problem occurs, where I'm trying to take one picture and something seemingly photobombs the picture. This happened twice a couple weeks ago. Sometimes the photobomb is a momentary inconvenience, but all too often the activity leads to the original subject and the photobomber fleeing from camera range. In this 1st one, I intended to get a picture of a Cabbage White butterfly on what I believe to be Birdsfoot Trefoil . Although I didn't think the trefoil was particularly popular with the pollinators, at least one butterfly was checking it out when another flew in. In this case the photobomb was probably about romance; the one with 2 dark smudges on the forewings is a female while the intruder with 1 smudge spot on its forewings is a male. (I have no idea if the...

A few weeks ago I got a picture of an American Bullfrog that looks kind of chubby. This was taken in the rain garden just west of the Duke Farms parking lot, probably aided by the water level being a little low. This meant the dense vegetation that's usually there wasn't interfering with my line of sight. (FWIW the water level is even lower now.) I don't know if the frog looked chubby because the location was providing an excellent supply of food, or if something more reproductive was going on. Female bullfrogs that are ready to lay eggs tend to look plumper. If this is a female preparing to lay eggs, she'll be selecting a handsome male bullfrog soon as her mate. They'll find a romantic spot in the water, he'll climb on top of her, and she'll release her eggs (up to 20,000 of them) directly into the water, and he'll release his sperm onto those eggs in the water ( external fertilization ).  So next year I should see 20,000 bullfrogs in this spot, right?...

Here's a butterfly I had only photographed once before, the Juniper Hairstreak . (I do see their (appropriately named) Red-banded Hairstreak cousins fairly regularly.) I was pretty sure I had a Juniper Hairstreak when I saw the green on it; there's only one other green hairstreak in NJ, and that one is usually seen in the southern part of the state. I wondered if I processed this picture incorrectly when I saw pictures of much greener Juniper Hairstreaks elsewhere on the web, but it does sound like there are color variations , and tend to get browner with age . (If this one had been a little older, I might not have recognized it as a JH.) I take pictures in "raw mode", then use software to try and get the best image before producing the pictures you see. In theory this gives me more ability to correct lighting, centering, and zoom limitations in the original photo, but I could also change an image to look much different than what I actually saw. It sounds like the Ea...

Here's one of the 1st Eastern Pondhawks I've seen this season. Like quite a few insects, they're light enough to safely land on pond scum. This was probably the 2nd and 3rd dragonfly I learned to identify, shortly after the Common Whitetail . Why do I say 2nd and 3rd? Well, originally I thought the blue males and the green females were separate species. But once I got identifications for them, I realized that those dragonflies I thought to be rivals might have been spouses. I haven't seen females out yet. My impression is that with some dragonflies the males emerge 1st, squabble over territory, and once their fighting has simmered down the females arrive on the scene. If you're wondering what the females (and immature males) look like, here's an old post  from a prior year. This spot also had Blue Dashers zipping around. I've heard different things about the way dragonflies of different species interact. Sometimes (especially if there's a substantial s...

Here's a belligerent wasp that you wouldn't want to meet, right? Wrong! This isn't a wasp at all but a non-stinging hoverfly , more precisely the Yellow-spotted Falsehorn. Note that I won't be able to tell you a lot about this fly since it's one of those species (and genii) that doesn't have a lot written about it (at least online). What I can tell you is that, like some other hoverflies like the Eastern Calligrapher and the Transverse-banded Flower Fly , these flies are bee/wasp mimics. In the insect world if you're not going to be dangerous yourself, it pays to at least look dangerous, and these guys do it by looking like someone who could sting you. And like the other hoverflies, as adults they do like their nectar. As kids (larvae) these flies bore into and eat wood, though it sounds like they mostly go after rotting wood/logs; it's unclear that they're much of a threat to healthy trees. The falsehorn flies shouldn't be confused with the ho...