Nature Note: A Naturalist's Travels Through Nature

It's important to take time to slow down even when you're a naturalist. Life can rev you up so quickly, so efficiently, that even in your daily routine, you might fail to notice a new spiderweb forming on a nearby window or the chewed remains of a walnut left by a squirrel on the front step. Recently, I have been looking to flowers to help buoy my mood. Alison has left for Nevada and although it's only been a week since I've seen her, the absence she left is palpable. I am alone and feel it as well. In an effort to try and motivate myself and brighten up the apartment where we have lived for the past four months, I bought a bouquet of sunflowers. I love sunflowers. Alison loves sunflowers too. They did an excellent job for a few days, but now their bulbous yellow crowns are drooping and fruit flies have taken up residence on their hairy stalks. As I write this, one is perched gingerly on the underside of one stalk, vibrating every time my fingers strike a key. I tho...

October is a strange month. Everything about it reeks of Hallowe'en or pumpkin flavoring or the last dregs of summer slowly fading into the bright fall colors and fresh breezes that we all wait for in the waning month of August. But there is something else just as noticeable as fall arrives and settles in and those are the abundant insects and other invertebrates that seem more visible than ever. While they are not a group that many are willing to actively look out for, they certainly are common enough to warrant a second look. This is the time of year when the crickets are in full song and the fuzziest caterpillars are migrating over the lawns and fields looking for a safe place to hole up for the winter months. It is also the time for the last butterflies flitting through the sunshine and for spiders to build their webs in wide open spaces to capture their abundant and unsuspecting prey. It has been over the past few weeks that several new and familiar invertebrates have caug...

As the summer begins to wind down, the trees buzz and trill with the songs of night-singing insects. As I walked around the backyard recording their sounds with my camera, I thought back to seeing some of the small red-headed tree crickets on the deck earlier in the week. It's too far north for Handsome Trigs ( Phyllopalpus puchellus ) surely, but they did look very similar to them indeed. The rather obvious "ch-ch-ch" or "katy-did" sounds are made by a large leaf-mimicking grasshopper called the Common True Katydid ( Pterophylla camellifolia ). I only started hearing them last week, but already I find it wonderful to fall asleep at night to the sounds of their stuttering courtship song. It's certainly cool enough to leave the windows open now and doing so certainly cools the body, soul, and mood. So here's to a winding down of summer with cooler days, warmer colors, and the ever present smell of cinnamon to come. Until then, lets enjoy the trills a...

For the past two weeks, I've been acclimatizing, getting to know the people, and learning my role for my job here in Horsham, Pennsylvania. As such, I've been looking around at what's similar and different about here to home. Earlier this week, I discovered these strange cocoons hanging from the tips of a spruce ( Picea spp. ) near the dining hall. I recognized them as bagworms, but admittedly, I know little about them. So after work I looked up some information on what species they were and their life cycle. The pictures above show small, pointed cocoons about 2 inches in length, that are constructed from needles and silk, and hang from the tips of the conifer. The photo below shows that there were a lot of them on the end of the branches. There were probably up to 30 or more on the upper and middle branches of the spruce and by the looks of it, the tree wasn't looking so hot. I visited PennState's College of Agricultural Sciences entomology page and found a...

This past week has certainly been telling me that spring is on the way with my earliest sighting of an Eastern Phoebe ( Sayornis phoebe ) ever last Sunday, to seeing a Red-winged Blackbird ( Agelaius phoeniceus ) and a Common Grackle ( Quiscalus quiscula ) at Cumberland Farms in Middleboro, and all the songbirds I've been hearing around the house too, it seems a sure sign that winter is coming to an end. Now when it comes to weather prediction and seasonal changes, the last thing I rely on is the perceived advice of a rodent. For those of you who don't know, I have a passionate disdain for woodchucks ( Marmota monax ) as they have made life difficult for the chickens by living under their shed and stealing their feed (which now costs $16 per bag making me even less happy to share the bounty with them). According to the rodent's forecast this year it would be the paradoxical claim of "six more weeks of winter" even though if the thing hadn't seen its shadow, it...