nature sightings

I've found a couple of monster stag beetles in the garden over the last few days. We've got railway sleepers in a few places, a couple of which have rotted, so I wonder if they've been nesting in there. One is easily the biggest I've seen and christ he was strong - was properly trying to have me through my gardening gloves. Awesome. The downside is my idiot cat who keeps hassling them: he's tried to bring two in, in the last two nights, and I don't really know what else to do - 'they're endangered, you hairy idiot!' isn't working.

Just to follow this up, I'm sat outside tonight (amazing stitch of a new moon just above the horizon) and there's a symphony of stag beetles buzzing and clattering across the purpling sky - maybe 4 or 5 different specimens and they're such awful fliers, like helicopters in a hurricane. They keep crashing into the back door, or landing in the hosters - each time throttling the wings and sounding entirely confused about the whole endeavour. What a daft, magnificent creature.

brings me back to my youth scampering about nature reserves :) i didn't know they were that endangered! but like greenfinches or frogs i guess there's a reason i rarely see them nowadays

today i saw a couple turkeys in a park where i had never seen them before. they were running too fast to get pictures, and one of them took flight before i lost sight of it. they definitely seem more like small dinosaurs than most birds do.

https://i.imgur.com/b9ccrWY.jpg

Mottled Tortoise Beetle

Does anyone fuck with the iNaturalist app? I just started in the last week or so and haven't totally got the hang of it. But it's like having a Pokedex in your pocket - does automated lookups of pictures that you upload. It isn't always correct, but then there's a social component where other users can check out your pics and suggest identifications.

This little guy, a northern water snake. They are common around here and frequently confused with copperheads, but are totally harmless.

Also, learned that "totally harmless" isn't the best descriptor for northern water snakes, since they are pretty aggressive and will bite if you fuck with them. But they are non-venomous.

hummingbird hawk moth yesterday

https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/sites/default/files/styles/node_hero_default/public/2018-01/Hummingbird%20Hawkmoth%202%20%28c%29%20Derek%20Moore.jpg

(not my pic)

Sweet! I saw one of those once - was very confusing, like looking at a platypus.

Jealous of you both, having just learned of the existence of hummingbird moths a few weeks ago.

Ha saw hummingbird moth for first time ever few weeks ago. In Creed CO. Got a great "live" pic of it feeding on flowers. Didn't know that's what it was til now.

Creede

1st one came and drank and fed on spilled bird seed and left. 1/2 hour later came back with a friend!
https://imgur.com/a/SLtB6Vi
Peccaries aka javelinas

Cool! I saw a snowberry clearwing this summer (on a trip to Six Flags, of all places).

https://static.inaturalist.org/photos/150726474/original.jpeg?1628965535

Hacking away at some neighbours bamboo that was encroaching on our property, I was alarmed by a rather agitated and forceful flapping. I looked up to see I'd exposed a wood pigeon and her large adult son or daughter sitting in their nest. Not the most expressive of birds, they carried on sitting there mutely while i showed them to my daughter. Then we saw two ladybirds having sex on the slide.

nature dogging

not a sighting, because lol nocturnal, but i heard great horned owls in my neighborhood last week!! and also back in march! in march there were 2 hooting to each other, this last time just 1 i think. did you know that the pointy bits on top of their heads are called PLUMICORNS and their eyes are CONICAL instead of spheres like ours?!?! so much love 4 owls, the loveliest fowls

I did not know that owls had conical eyes! Last week I learned that - for tawny owls at least - the females go 'twit' and the males go 'to-woo'.

On the basis that mundane back garden nature sightings are better than none:

Saw the mum and baby fat teenage pigeon from above sitting on our fence. The mum flew off to another bit of fence and her child followed her, nuzzling up and presumably saying 'gimme some food'. The mum flew off again, got followed again. And again. And again. Very much like the current relationship between my wife and our youngest daughter. At one point, intentionally or otherwise, the baby flapped her wing over mum's back so it looked like she was giving her a cuddle.

A month or so ago we got a garden pond - v small, 50cm across. Finally saw a frog! And some tiny - barely 2mm long - fish or fish-like creatures. My question is, how did they get there? Where did they come from and how did they travel?

Have you put plants in the pond? maybe eggs attached to the plants?

Could they be tadpoles?

Way too small for tadpoles - I think they might be gnat or midge or mosquito larvae :( will see if I can get a closer look at some. (Yes there are plants in the pond.)

Saw a Heron fly between me and a Swan's nest in town.
Saw loads of overgrown undergrowth I fought my way through to get to a part of the woods i hadn't been in. Thought about the local woods non well trodden areas versus a place in the forestry wood plantations in mayo I saw 10 years ago and wondered if I was remembering clearly or if the situation was significantly different that different things would be growing. I just got knocked out by that stuff in Mayo and was less surprised by the local stuff. May be more traffic in the area. Not sure if that's an influence.

Anyway seeing trees that have been allowed to grow for years and in weird forms. Undergrowth, and fun things like that.

mosquito larvae are pretty distinctive ledge. They hang upside down just below the surface and come up regularly to get air from a breathing tube at the end of the abdomen

midge larvae basically look like little worms (often red) and typically stick to the bottom of ponds

signed, someone with a container pond who has disposed of untold numbers of the tenacious little feckers

Definitely mosquito larvae. how much of a problem are they? I found one site which said you just need to wait for something bigger that will eat them to come along.

We went pond dipping in a bigger pond this morning, I caught a newt and two tadpoles. Then in a stream we found lots of freshwater shrimp, water slaters and mayfly larvae, and flatworms and/or leeches - all identified thanks to an educational sheet someone had.

"Come on up, and I'll show you my caligraphy..."

https://i.imgur.com/srtKhUF.jpg

Margined caligrapher flies

𝑜𝒽 𝓁𝒶 𝓁𝒶

I highly recommend the Seek app for plant/bug/bird/ identification (if you can get the bugs or birds to stay still long enough). It can pinpoint a species almost instantly if you can get a good shot of it. Only downside is that I have been meaning to take my phone out less, not more, especially outdoors & with the kids around.

Ooh, that'd prove handy for bugs and plants. I prefer to flex my skillz for birds (but I could probably do with a call identification app, of which there are many)

BirdNet is the call ID app I've been using for the past few years

At this point I can pretty much identify anything you're likely to hear in a Dublin garden by ear. It really is one of the most satisfying things you can learn

I'll definitely give that a try.

I've learned it all by ear over the years and a combination of transliterations in books (which, jeez) and https://xeno-canto.org. I can manage all the garden birds and a fair chunk of the rest of the woodland/farmland birds (wildfowl is another story).

Seek looks good. Thanks for the heads up.

transliterations in books (which, jeez)

yeah, these never even sound remotely like what I'm hearing

I highly recommend the Seek app for plant/bug/bird/ identification (if you can get the bugs or birds to stay still long enough).

I use the iNaturalist app. My wife found a similar app for rocks and minerals last week, but I haven't checked it out yet myself.

And yes, staying still for long enough is a problem with insects, for sure. I now almost exclusively refer to butterflies as "damned butterflies" because they are such a pain to photograph. I don't take many bird pics - they are usually too far away for my cell phone camera to get a good picture of. Either that or they're conveniently backlit by the sun.

Saw some American Goldfinches yesterday. Although they're not rare or anything, they're still kinda an uncommon treat for me.

My friends on their Lake District jaunt were highly impressed when I responded to their speculative WhatsApp recording with an instant 'Willow warbler' recently #braggin

The worst ever bird guide transliteration I've seen was my beloved childhood bird guide claiming that the Cetti's Warbler goes 'cetti! cetti!', which is just hilarious, it is more like 'cha! wurr-chacha-wurr-cha'

Cetti's are so explosive and acidic - and they always seem to be right there in your face, even when 30 yards away.

I'm convinced they use willow warblers as pretty much every 'bird' Foley effect on telly programmes - including the US programmes I catch (and often totally out of season). Anyone else noticed that?

Saw this wood louse infected with isopod iridescent virus, which turns them a bluish-purple color.

https://static.inaturalist.org/photos/206537054/large.jpeg

Things you were shockingly old when you learned: sloe = blackthorn, and they are fairly abundant, though none of the ones near me seem to have fruited this year - except for a neighbours hedge, so I'm finally getting round to making sloe gin. On my quest to find sloes I found some people picking rosehips for rosehip and lemon gin so maybe I'll give that a go too.

Oh I saw a heron on the towpath too:

https://i.imgur.com/jk2Mtb7.jpg

it's big boy day

Seen parakeets in Oxford recently, including one in our garden. They are clearly on their way up the Thames. I saw some in Old Windsor in 2018. Maybe they'll reach Cirencester before the decade's out.

And a very skittish egret in our local nature reserve.

The muntjacs in the woods behind our house are getting very brave. I find they quite often stand and stare at you like foxes do. Lockdown may be a contributory factor but I suspect one of my neighbours is giving them carrots.

heron watch #2 - went to a pond where in the summer we'd been pond dipping and caught newts and tadpoles. as i approached. with my 3 year old daughter on the back of my bike, i saw a heron. we stopped and looked at it through some long grass, it saw us and stalked away but only to the edge of the pond. it had something long and black in its mouth but i couldn't make out what it was. we walked slowly closer - i couldn't have been more visible in my red rain jacket, but it didn't fly away. it was maybe ten metres away, on the other side of the pond. whatever it had in its mouth it seemed to be repeatedly dipping into then lifting out of the water. finally i managed to make out, dangling either side of its beak and definitely kicking, the legs and feet of what was almost certainly a frog. a few seconds later it got swallowed.

Mother elk this past summer in Rocky Mountain National Park:

https://i.postimg.cc/4dpRZyCr/Elk.jpg

Nice!

egret in the slough next to where I work (Springfield OR)

two young foxes playing in the moonlight (Trinidad CA)

wild turkey just hanging out in the trees (Trinidad)

absolute cacophony of frog song hereabouts, sheer amphibious pandemonium, good god you never heard such lovesick frogs

That's my favorite harbinger of spring, the night all the peepers start peeping en masse.

it is pretty dang cute 💚🐸💚

tho they also remind me of the "honk if you're horny" tim robinson sketch

the frog orgy has run its course, barring a few lonelyheart holdouts, so last night it was quiet enough to hear a pack of coyotes whooping it up! once i'd made sure they were coyotes and not people howling (omg do you remember the early covid howl-alongs?!) i went out hoping to get a better earful, but no joy. the crickets had a lot to say, though, and there was a recurrent fluttering flutey hoot like that of a screech owl, and creeks trickling silver in the moonlight, etc.

I'm jealous of the cricket noise and have been all my life, you'd have to go the snake food section of Pets At Home to hear them where I live and that isn't a very pleasant way to hear them.

I usually see about one snapping turtle a year in my neighborhood. This lady, however, chose a local playground as a less-than-ideal spot to lay her eggs. After several frantic early morning calls to wildlife rehabilitation experts, we just let her finish her egg-laying (as is required by law in MD). Then a neighbor and I hauled her back to the river. Apparently, they lay the eggs really deep (one rehabber described the egg hole as "like a Pringles can") so there's a chance the turtles will be okay. I'm to keep an eye on the spot in early August to see if any hatchlings need help making their way to water.

https://i.imgur.com/qMaBcFb.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/irjZnVd.jpg

I really recommend the Merlin app, which identifies birds by their sounds. Know what the birds are before you see them!

https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/

It doesn't only work for birdsong; it can identify woodpeckers by their pecking!

learning to identify birdsong yourself (which you'll be able to do over time if you use one of the apps regularly) is genuinely one of the most life-enriching things you can do

what once was just pleasant background noise becomes incredibly engrossing - especially when you can pick out alarm calls and know something (e.g. a hawk) might be about to go down

Also when you know most of the common birds, anytime you hear something out of the ordinary you'll be desperately scrabbling for your app!

@girlinwhiteglasses on instagram has a series of cool posts for birdsong identification: "if it sounds like a..."

https://www.instagram.com/girlinwhiteglasses/

Regarding alarm sounds, I saw a hawk grab lunch from a nest the other day. Various other birds were in the air and branches around it, creating a racket. A few were definitely crows, but there were smaller birds in there that I couldn't identify.

We saw a Northern Flicker woodpecker on the ground we thought was dead. Turns out it was feeding - they dig for ants and beetles.

recently saw a yellow shafted northern flicker in the vacant lot outside my kitchen window... I jumped up, had no idea what the hell it was... I thought it might be somebody's escaped pet. Apparently pretty rare in the west, but not unknown in the winter

https://photoartflight.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/mg_3370paf.jpg
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/news/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/NFlickers2-yellow_McMullen-red_Steckel.jpg

Yes, recently I found out the same is true of one of the UK woodpeckers. The green woodpecker feeds mainly on ants on the ground and doesn't forage on tree trunks like the others.

Jeez that yellow woodpecker is beautiful.

Green woodpeckers don't drum either - only greater spot/lesser spot (and it's only in the spring for sexxy reasons, not, as one might think, to get food).

This magnificent giant Pacific Octopus caught off the coast of California by sportfishers pic.twitter.com/X3upclo62I

— Nature is Amazing ☘️ (@AMAZlNGNATURE) April 7, 2024

free him