Earlier this year, just in time for spring, I completed an early version of my book 1001 Species: A Natural History of a Small Town and offered it to the public as free PDF download. It enjoyed moderate success in the very small and rather niche market it was offered to and [...]
There are two groups of plants that are always spoken of as "THE" obligatory species to grow in a wildlife garden - Asters and Golden Rod. Very hot and sunny this afternoon in the garden and ten minutes baking in front of a single Golden Rod produced these eight species. There were more [...]
J, my irreplaceable and invaluable spotter of good things, directed me to these two Clouded Sulphur butterflies in the garden who were making merry, or even hay while the sun shines, on the New England Asters. Clearly they were intent on trying to make more butterflies. The rear butterfly is the male and [...]
Great Black Digger Wasp (Sphex pensylvanicus) J drew this to my attention. Normally I would pass this insect by, having tipped a hat to it as one does, as being just another mud-wasp which we often see beside the garden pond. But ... it was enormous, longer than my standard top-joint-of-the-thumb definition of [...]
Although they are not native plants we have a well behaved group of Japanese Anemones in the garden that I always look forward to flowering. One of the native bumble bees was assiduously working the flowers and had pollen sacks full to bursting.
Something a little unusual in this morning's garden. This is a "Bee Fly" and possibly Exoprosopa decora ... the Progressive Bee Fly. To quote from the internet - a member of the Bombyliidae which is a family of flies (diptera) comprising hundreds of genera, but the life cycles of most species are [...]
The photo gallery from the Isles-de-la-Madeleine is going to take some time to assemble with almost a 1000 photos to process and consider (and cull down to manageable levels) but while my readers are eagerly waiting in suspense I thought I would share an observation of just one species as a "taster" of [...]
A cautionary tale for amateur entomologists I assume that a professional would never do something as dumb as this. Would they? In a passage in his autobiography, Charles Darwin wrote in a letter to one Leonard Jenyns* that a (bombardier) beetle had attacked him. Quote: " ... I must tell you what [...]
We spent this sunny morning wandering in the arboretum. The leaves have barely started to appear until the last day or two and so the forest floor is covered with ephemeral species flowers and simply glorious. It will only be like this for a week or so now and the weather forecast [...]
Temperatures a bit above 10C in the past couple of days and some warm sunshine produced the emergence of a number of tiny bees busily investigating leaf litter and Sanguinaria and crocus flowers near the garden waterfall this afternoon ... the camera and I went outside to meet them. These bees are a [...]