#cityspider

[Image Description: Most of the picture is filled with tall green plants. in the very center, there is a brown plant that is very fluffy, with a bird perched on it. The bird is all black, except for its beak and a patch of bright orangish-red on its shoulder.]

Lookit this bird! It’s a black bird! It’s got a red wing! It is, in fact, a Red Winged Blackbird (Agelaius phoeniceus)! Because sometimes, it actually is that easy. 

I saw this when I was out with my Adventure Buddy at a wildlife reserve in Watertown, MA. I’m tickled pink by the fact that the allaboutbirds.org page I used to confirm species stated "the Red-winged Blackbird is a familiar sight atop cattails...” which...yep! Pretty sure that’s a cattail under it (although I’ll save the scientific name for when I do a proper post). 

When looking at the wikipedia page, I was excited to learn that this may be the most abundant bird in the US, and that their flock size can exceed a million birds per flock! That being said, the female of the species is much less visually spectacular, and is pretty much just shades of brown, so that might explain why we’re not just constantly seeing them. New goal: Find and photograph a lady red-winged blackbird sometime!

[Image Description: A blue insect with a long thin body is centered in front of a background of a small river. There are a few ripples and leafs in the water, but mostly the background is blurred. The insect has big black eyes, and delicate, lace-like wings that are folded together above its back. The blue skin of the insect has some black stripes on it as well.]

One of the only things I *do* know about nature is the difference between dragonflies and damselflies. A dragonfly rests with its wings apart, laying horizontally open. A damselfly rests with its wings together, vertically above its back. So this is definitely a damselfly --the needle-like body is another good hint. 

I used insectidentification.org to confirm the name of this beauty, since I’ve seen this kind of damselfly quite a bit. It’s a Familiar Bluet (Enallagma civile). I saw her at Pinewoods camp, which is located near Plymouth, Massachusetts. 

[Image Description: Four shots of different plants. In the first two photos, there are a couple large four-petaled blue flowers around a cluster of hundreds of teeny-tiny blue blossoms. You can also see several leaves in the background. The third picture appears to be the same plant, but a light purple (almost pink). There are several clusters of the big flowers surrounding the smaller ones. The last photo is just of the green leaves of the plant. There’s a just starting to bud cluster of small blossoms in the middle of the leaves, but no big blossoms around it.]

This was going to be my first failure! 

I saw those beautiful blue flowers at Pinewoods Camp this year, and took a couple pictures. They were not natural, being planted alongside one of the buildings, but I thought they were pretty regardless. I pulled up the photo, hit up some flower IDing sites...and got nowhere fast. I just couldn’t figure out the right combination of keywords to get me a result. 

But then, just this past weekend, I was out walking with a friend and we spotted the purple version! I immediately took some extra pictures to keep trying to ID it, while my friend mentioned casually that he had a source for IDing flowers. He posted on the book of faces, tagged us both in, and lo and behold, his flower friend appeared to tell us it was a very pretty colour of Lacecap Hydrangea (Hydrangea macrophylla). Thank you friend of a friend!

Reading up about the species on wikipedia, I found that the different colour blossoms is dependent on the pH of the soil! My Pinewoods hydrangeas are planted in a more acidic soil, while the pinky ones found in the middle of Boston are in a more alkaline! I vaguely knew that “soil pH” is one of those things gardeners think about (like amount of sunlight and water content) but I’m excited to see such a clear difference. 

Part of why it was so hard for me to identify was my confusion at the same plant having big flowers and little flowers. As it turns out, that’s a feature of the plant! Those big ones are the splashy attractors, to get pollinators buzzing around and interested. All the actually fertile parts of the plant are in that middle section. I think that’s pretty neat! 

I think the big lesson here is just a reminder for my silly brain that the internet is an amazing resource, but it is not the only resource. Adventure Buddy has helped ID things before, and there’s no reason not to reach out to the other clever people I know when I’m getting stuck. 

[Image Description: There is a turtle in the center of this photo! The photo is very closely cropped around the turtle, who is standing on a sunny rock, with a greenish pond in the background. The turtle has a very muddy shell. Its limbs and head are outstretched, and you can see a stripe of red behind its eye, and bands of yellow on its jaw and leg.]

My frequent Adventure Companion is a big time number one fan of turtles, which means I have developed a fondness for these critters as well, and have tried to get quite a few photos of them over the years. I saw this one last June in NYC, when I was wandering around the greener parts of Central Park. A slightly different shot of this same turtle (and its buddy!) graces the header of this very blog.

Despite the New York origin, I wound up using www.massaudubon.org/ to ID this friend. Those bright red spots make it pretty clearly a Red-Eared Slider (Trachemys scripta elegans). Which, I was surprised to learn, is incredibly invasive. Enough so that it warranted inclusion in the Invasive Species Specialist Group’s list “100 of the World’s Worst Invasive Alien Species”! Now we go ooo and aah at the global tenacity of this Mississippi native.

Oooo! Aaaah!

They are _super_ illegal in Australia, and moderately illegal in the EU and Japan. Their invasiveness seems to be entirely from feral colonies formed from pets that have been released or escaped. Friends, if you get a pet animal, do not send that animal to live in the wild when you’re done with it. The *best* case scenario is that it gets almost immediately killed by something native because it’s not prepared. Worst case? They push out the natives, hog all the food, and transmit diseases to other animals and humans alike.

[Image Description: Two pictures of a purple insect with a long thin body, very large eyes, and lace-like wings. The insect is sitting on something wooden. The first picture is a side-view of the insect. The second picture is taken at a three-quarters angle, to emphasize the insects eyes.]

I went to Acadia! It was an absolute delight of an adventure, except for the part where it turns out Acadian dragonflies are the least well-behaved dragonflies I’ve ever met. More on that later...

The *damselflies* on the other hand were quite responsive. This one in particular was more than happy to pose, so I could get some nice shots. Look at that purple! It’s most likely a subspecies of Variable Dancer (Argia fumipennis) called Violet Dancer. A perfect name!

Do check as full-size a version of this photo as you can, because *wow* is she a delight. I love looking at damselfly and dragonfly wings --they’re so delicate!

[Image Description: Three images of the same bug. In all three, they are close-up images of a large bug (about 2-3 inches long) clinging to the outside of a window screen. The first is a side view of the bug, where you can see its large greenish eyes and it’s grey-tan body. The second is a top view, where you can see more detail of the translucent wings, and the feathering of the antennae. The third is a view of it spreading its wings out as though it were about to fly, making them more obviously translucent.]

One of the best parts about being “that weirdo who likes bugs” is that gradually all your friends figure it out and then excitedly drag you over whenever they see a cool bug! Such was the case with this big beauty, in the midst of one of the late-night parties at Pinewoods camp. I didn’t even know the friend in question liked bugs, and after I took a bunch of pictures, we went inside to borrow a bug book and try and ID it.

(Any quality dance camp should have a number of reference books available, on the local flora and fauna. I’m trying to grow my own small collection as well, but it’s convenient to not have to carry the library with me.)

We were ten minutes of flipping through pages in, when my Adventure Buddy wandered over and glanced at the photo on my camera screen. “Oh, what a nice Eastern Dobsonfly!” (Corydalus cornutus) says he, and one flip to the correct section later, we’ve confirmed he’s right! It’s a female Dobsonfly, which my more recent research implies is capable of delivering a pretty nasty bite! I’m a little bummed I didn’t get a closer picture of her powerful mandibles...but then again, maybe I didn’t want to get *too* close!

There are varieties of Dobsonflies all over the world, some of which can grow to have as much as a seven or eight inch wingspan! They live a short life, about a week at most, and spend it trying to ensure the continuation of their magnificent species. I’m a bit disappointed I couldn’t spot a male Dobsonfly as well, as the gents have significant mandibles, long enough to almost be mistaken for another set of antennae!

[Image Description: A spider is in the center of the photo. You can see strands of web around the spider, but the background is completely blurred. The spider is mostly a pale greenish colour, with almost translucent legs. There are three black stripes on the abdomen of the spider, and one black stripe on the head.]

Check out this absolute beauty of a spider! She was chilling out, just weaving her picture-perfect web and occasionally eating big ol’ bugs (photographic evidence of that coming later!)

I found a completely lovely website called insectidentification.org, and was scanning through the pictures of Massachusetts insects looking for interesting things when lo and behold, I found a snapshot of this sweetie. Which is why I can tell you she is a Venusta Orchard Spider (Leucauge venusta) and also just about the prettiest spider I’ve ever seen. She’s an orb weaver, who sits in the middle of her web and prays on anything unfortunate enough to fly in. 

Oh man, birds are super cool! They can fly! They go zoom! They peck! Stick? 

However, I can warn you right now that they are hard to sneak up on, and they fly away very fast. My current camera does *amazing* macro photography. Anything I can get close to, I can photograph --even if it is very tiny! However, the downside is that my camera has a very poor zoom. Anything more than about ten feet away, it’s gonna be hard for me to get a good photo. 

This certainly doesn’t mean I’m not going to try --and my old camera had a completely knock-out zoom so I’ve got an archive of images I can use. But this, five posts in, is your official warning about the continuing content of the blog: Lots of bugs! Not so many birds. In fact, the first five posts (spider, insect, reptile, plant, bird) is probably a good prediction of the continuing content here.

In general, if there’s a specific thing you’re interested in, check the tags. I am doing what I can to thoroughly and accurately tag every post I make. There’s even a rudimentary “tags” page at the top of this blog! If all you want to see are birds, have at...just don’t expect as many updates as for my fellow bug-lovers.