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By Ben, on September 8th, 2010
A two-year-old mystery has come closer to being solved, thanks to the friendly folks at bugguide.net. You see, back when Tropical Storm Fay blew into town on August 18, 2008, a large dragonfly took shelter on our porch:
It is long and slender-bodied, almost like a knitting or darning needle. I can recall that it was quite large; I don’t think I’d ever seen such a large dragonfly so close before. The eyes are huge; see how there’s no “top of the head” on this guy? There’s eyes, and nothing else. And as you can see, it was hanging vertically from [...]
By Ben, on September 7th, 2010
I think everyone likes to learn things. I know I do. Last week when I spotted a dragonfly perched in the oak tree out front, I grabbed my camera and binoculars to investigate a bit further. Perched Dragonflies are Much Easier to Identify than Flying Dragonflies.
There are 169 species records in Florida now, but these include both the zygoptera (damselwings) and the anisoptera (dragonflies); I’m not sure what the breakdown between the two groups is. Back in 1989, when Sidney Dunkle published his groundbreaking field guide to the state, he included 86 dragonfly species (94 with Bermuda and the Bahamas [...]
By Ben, on September 6th, 2010
My post about the Pierides the other day got me thinking of Alexander Pope’s advice, in his Essay on Criticism: “A little learning is a dang’rous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.”
Pieria was a region in ancient Macedonia, rather than Thessaly where Pierus and his daughters (the Pierides) lived. But Macedonia was where Mount Olympus was supposed to be, and the Muses (also called the Pierides after they pwned Pierus’s daughters in the earliest episode of Ancient Greek Idol) hung out there. So Pieria might well have been named for the Muses, rather than the ancient tribe, the Pieres, [...]
By Ben, on September 3rd, 2010
Lots and lots of insects are small. Even butterflies, those showy, gaudy, colorful things, can be very small (they can also be pretty big, of course). The other day I was out weeding the front yard when I noticed this little teeny tiny butterfly in the grass:
In this photo, which is backlit, you can see the faint yellow patterning through the wings. But since I couldn’t see that through my viewfinder (it’s a small butterfly, remember?), I decided to crawl around to the other side, so I could have the sun behind me:
And that’s when I was able to see [...]
By Ben, on September 2nd, 2010
I was browsing my favorite used bookstore in Boca the other day (I say “my favorite,” but actually, I think it’s the only used bookstore in Boca. Nevertheless.) when I ran across four volumes in the Florida’s Fabulous… series. I pounced on them the way a tiger beetle pounces on other beetles, or a robber fly pounces on a bee, even though paying full price for these large format mass market volumes wouldn’t break the bank.
Mark Deyrup, the author of Florida’s Fabulous Insects, is another of those entomological writers who proves how one can relate charming stories in an engaging [...]
By Ben, on August 30th, 2010
So I was riding my bike Saturday morning with Eric. It was hot. Hotter than last weekend, when the nice west wind and cloud cover brought a noticeable (not strong, just noticeable) coolness to one or two shady areas along the ride. This morning there was no such thing. It was hot.
Anyway, the heat reminded me that we were still in or near the dog days of summer, which I wrote about earlier, in connection with the moon. The Latin for dog days, of course, is diēs caniculārēs. (I inexplicably left that out of my post on the Dog Days [...]
By Ben, on August 24th, 2010
The moon goes by many different names. Here are the moon names for August according to MoonPhase, one of my favorite lunar apps for my iPod (and iPad, but I’m consulting the iPod version because Someone Who Shall Remain Nameless drained the battery last night and didn’t plug it in so it’s recharging from the wall charger):
August (Calendar Month)
Dog Days (in Colonial American parlance)
Sturgeon (Algonquin, which was the basis for the Farmers’ Almanac moon names)
Grain (English)
Dispute (Celtic)
Wyrt (Medieval wiccan)
Lightning (Neo pagan).
Whatever you call it, it happens today at 1:05 p.m. EDT. And as you may recall from previous full moon [...]
By Ben, on August 22nd, 2010
As I mentioned last week, you have to start early if you want to beat the August heat when birding the western areas of Palm Beach County. Here’s an example of how early I’m talking about: we’ve been on the road for a half-hour already, and have just made our first stop, STA-1W:
At 10 square miles, most places would probably consider STA-1W to be a giant filtration marsh, but this is Florida real estate: it’s all about location, location, location. Situated at the northwestern edge of a Truly Giant filtration marsh (the 227 square miles of northern Everglades habitat otherwise [...]
By Ben, on August 13th, 2010
Today I took a day off from work, for the first time in a long time. I needed to, because tomorrow I’m leading a field trip for the Audubon Society of the Everglades to the flooded fields of one of the larger farms in western Palm Beach County. We head out there every year around this time, because the farmers flood the fields to keep the soil from disappearing, the weeds from growing, and other bad things from happening. All this shallow water attracts lots and lots of wading birds. And so, naturally, it attracts birders as well. We’re very fortunate [...]
By Ben, on August 6th, 2010
As you can see from today’s Astronomy Photo of the Day, the sun is becoming quite a bit active these days. I ran outside this afternoon and tried to figure out how to get my point and shoot camera to take decent pictures of the sun through the spotting scope, but, as you can see, I failed:
Sunspot, August 6. 2010. 4 p.m. EDT.
Another sunspot. August 6, 2010, 4 p.m. EDT.
Both of these spots were taken from the same image:
Sun in white-light Baader filter. August 6, 2010. 4 p.m. EDT
It’s challenging focusing on the sun through a point [...]
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