Bryan's Posts About Insects

The Year in Flight

They dwell on northern bogs and at ponds, and do what damselflies do: fly around, kill things and have sex. To casual observers, this pair of Subarctic Bluets (Coenagrion interrogatum) may appear no different than many other little blue damselflies…

The Troubling Buzz on Bees

From my colleagues at the Vermont Center for Ecostudies: More than one-quarter of Vermont’s bumble bee species, which are vital crop pollinators, have either vanished or are in serious decline, according to a new investigation from the Vermont Center for…

The Last Butterfly

By Bryan on November 5, 2013 From spring through fall, they flickered and fluttered among us – tiny flashes of red, orange, yellow and blue floating above hayfields and dancing in flower gardens: Spring Azures, Great Spangled Fritillaries, Red Admirals,…

Zombie Aspen Leaves

Yellow and brown and down to earth, they might appear dead. But they are not quite dead. They are the undead: zombie aspen leaves.

Monhegan Report No. 2: The Other Migration

On the breath of Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind, migrants blew onto Monhegan Island Tuesday morning. No fallout, but we were busy with some of the place-name warblers: Tennessee, Nashville, Cape May. South winds Wednesday produced a quiet morning.

Dirty Insect Image No. 2

It spends most of its life as an egg attached to the underside of a cranberry leaf in a single spruce bog. But during its week-or-so fling as a tiny adult, the Bog Copper (Lycaena epixanthe), about the size of…

Monarchs Wednesday in Brookfield

Dirty Insect Image No. 1

By Bryan on August 25, 2013 Perhaps this will be a new blog feature: insects, um, er, you know, making more insects. I’ve got scores of these. I’ll begin with this copulating pair of White-faced Meadowhawks (Sympetrum obtrusum), which I…

What’s This? No. 14

At long last my What’s This? challenge returns with a highlight of my summer road trip. This is among the most remarkable of its kind ever discovered. The first to name it wins fame and $5 off any of my…

Oh, Canada

Before I say anything about Canada, about the reasonable food at Tim Hortons and crystalline waters of Lake Superior, about loonies and toonies; before I celebrate vast bogs and infinite lakes, Baird’s Sparrows and the Wawa Goose; before you get…

National Moth Week 2013

By Bryan on July 23, 2013 Grab the kids, chill the beer, mash the bananas, paint the trees, and leave the porch light burning – it’s National Moth Week. Here’s my contribution, from north central Saskatchewan, well over halfway to…

DSA Update No. 6 (Final): Emeralds

Little else in nature rivals the scintillation, the explosion of green, expressed in the eyes of the dragonflies we call “Emeralds.” Here’s how it usually happens: You’re squishing around in a spruce bog or walking a woodland trail, and you…