Bryan's Posts About Insects

Among Dead Insects (Again)

Although they’ve been dead for more than two centuries, there is life in these dragonflies. The life of a legendary biologist here in Copenhagen.

A Dragonfly and a Truck

Four wings, four wheels, 200,000 miles and yet another “guy thing” in Maine, NY.

DSA Update No. 5: Carnage & Closure

Here’s a parting shot from the 2014 DSA meeting in Wisconsin: dragonflies being dragonflies – flying around, having sex, and killing things, including one another.

Got Milkweed?

Now drifting back into northern sections of the United States, Monarchs face a perfect storm of threats. But you can plant the seeds (literally) to help America’s favorite insect.

DSA Update No. 4: Gomphicide

PICK ANY SCENE FROM THE DRAMA OF LIFE ON EARTH: birth, growth, courtship, sex, subterfuge, betrayal, murder. Find them all expressed in the lives of dragonflies. Shakespeare could write the script on these predators.

DSA Update No. 3: Satisfaction

ENVISION SOMETHING YOU REALLY LOVE but only get to experience now and then. Shooting the moon in hearts. Live chamber music. Big Papi hitting a walk off homer. Fresh strawberry pie. We’ve got that in dragonflies here in Wisconsin.

DSA Update No. 2: Other Orders

TICK NUMBER 26 made her fatal move while I was eating broasted chicken (whatever that is) and drinking a Bud at the Back Door Cafe in Ladysmith, Wisconsin.

DSA Update No. 1: The Gomphids

TO BE COMPLETELY HONEST ABOUT IT, the Annual Meeting of the Dragonfly Society of the Americas is really an excuse for a lot of nice people to cavort together in wetlands and rivers with nets and cameras.

Dirty Insect Image No. 4: Mustard Whites

In my continuing series of Dirty Insect Images, this pair of Mustard Whites (Pieris napi) spent about 10 minutes copulating on a red maple seedling yesterday.

Montpelier Wild No. 4: April Fireworks

In Monday’s heat the butterflies awoke. During our walk around Berlin Pond, where we noted 32 bird species, Ruth and I saw the year’s first butterflies: Mourning Cloak and Eastern Comma. They were also 2013’s last butterflies. These two species…

 Subarctic Bluets (Coenagrion interrogatum)

Dirty Insect Image No. 3

Valentine’s Day greetings from a pair of Subarctic Bluets (Coenagrion interrogatum) making more Subarctic Bluets at a pond in central Saskatchewan last summer.

Life Among the Dead

Here in one of our great museum collections, I find warmth, diversity, shock, awe and innumerable stories of life on Earth.