Watching Carrot Wasps in the Garden
Watching Carrot Wasps (Gasteruption sp) in Southwestern Colorado. Do I know how to live or what?
A Good Life
Miscellaneous Wanderings and Maunderings
A Good Life
Miscellaneous Wanderings and Maunderings
Wasps
Watching a Spider Wasp Hunting in Southwestern Colorado
Photos and text from an afternoon spent watching a Pompilid Spider Wasp catching a Spider in Southwestern Colorado.
Watching Tarantula Hawks on Desert Milkweed in Tucson, Arizona
A meditation on watching and photographing Tarantula Hawks in Arizona.
Barn Swallows destroy a Bald-faced Hornet nest
Most Summers, we’ll get several pairs of Barn Swallows nesting in the garage. They’ll raise young in the Spring, and then perhaps try for a second clutch later in the Summer. There are usually a couple of weeks in the…
Aphid Mummy
Here’s a photo of a a couple of Aphids on a Brittlebush leaf, taken in Tucson, Arizona, in March of 2004. The Aphid in the foreground is smaller, darker, and you can see that there’s a shed skin on the…
Thistledown Velvet Ant – Dasymutilla pseudopappus
Yesterday (2022-10-23) I was walking along a trail in Southwestern Colorado, at an elevation of about 6200′. As I looked down, I saw a bit of white fluff in the middle of the trail, one that was moving of its…
Xanthoteras eburneum – Cynipid Wasp galls on Gambel Oak
I was on a hike the other day in a Ponderosa Pine forest in Southwestern Colorado, at about 7000′. There were a number of small Gambel Oak seedlings in the trail, and some of their leaves had a line of…
Scrub Oak Gall
On a sunny August day in 2001, I was hiking along a small creek in Arizona’s Mazatzal Mountains. I noticed some brightly colored spheres attached to some of the scrub oak near the creek. They had a glaring, artificial quality…
Head Full of Birds
This year, a family of Wrens built their nest inside our front-yard Elk skull. This is the first year that they’ve nested there. Other years, we’ve had Paper Wasps building nests inside of the skull. I don’t think there is…