I’ve been sort of lazy about posting lately. For the last week, I’ve been on semi-“vacation” which means catching up on writing projects and things around the house between wrapping up my summer field work and preparing to begin fall banding next week. It’s pretty stressful to me not to have any true down time, but I’ll just breathe into a paper bag in the corner and get on with this post.

One of my goals this summer was to learn more about the other flying objects in my small urban yard. Aside from birds, I know a lot about Odonata (damselflies and dragonflies) as I do a lot of survey work with them, and am handy with Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) as well. My friend Mark is a Hymenoptera expert (bees, wasps, ants) , and last year identified a photo I’d taken of a wasp outside my dining room window as a species new to the state! We co-authored a paper on it after he obtained a specimen.

This inspired me to get to know this order better. And Diptera (flies) seemed neglected, so I thought I’d toss them in the mix. I targeted species in my yard that for the most part were pollinators, stayed still long enough to be photographed, and were large enough (>3 mm) and distinctive enough to be identified at least to family.  Here is a sampling of some of the more interesting flies I’ve encountered. If you let me know you like this sort of stuff, I’ll do a few more posts like this over the rest of the summer.

Yes, I did say flies.  This is not a bumblebee, but a fly in the family Syphidae, Mallota bautias. Syrphids are a wide and varied family of mostly bee and wasp mimics which I think are incredibly cool and interesting.

Here’s another Syrphid, Spilomyia alcimus, a fantastic yellowjacket mimic.

Not all bee and wasp mimics are Syrphids.  This potter wasp mimic is a thick-headed fly in the family Conopidae, Physocephala tibialis. They are internal parasites of bumblebees, laying their eggs right into the abdomens of worker bees; the larvae apparently do not kill the bees. This one was hanging around a plant that always had bumblebees present.

Another well-known family of parasitic flies are the Tachinidae, the second largest family in the order. All larvae are parasitoids of other insects. Many species specialize in particular hosts, but every other insect order has some tachinid that parasitizes it. A lot of tachinids are sort of non-descript. Yellow is not as common a color, and I think this is in the genus Genea.

Feather-legged flies are a subfamily of Tachinidae. I have photographed one species in the yard, but this one, which I found at a local park, is way cooler. It’s Trichopoda pennipes, whose larvae are internal parasites of true bugs (Hemipterans) such as stink bugs. They’ve been introduced to Europe for pest control. I’ve been unable to find out the function of the feathery setae on the tibiae. If anybody knows, please comment!

 

A couple years ago, I did a post on the hanging thief, a fly in the charismatic family Asilidae, or robber flies. Not all robber flies are as large and distinctive as hanging thieves. This one, in the genus Holcocephala, is about 5 mm long, and feeds on gnats and other small insects.

I’ve photographed over 30 species so far (that I’ve identified), and an equal number of Hymenoptera. Soon, the asters and goldenrods will be in bloom, and I expect to find more new species. Let me know if you want to see more!

Eastern cicada killers (Sphecius speciosus) are big wasps. The “dainty” males are about 3 cm long, and the females up to 4 cm. Adding to the intimidation factor is the behavior of the males, which gather in “leks” of up to 70 individuals — all buzzing around and defending small territories, awaiting the appearance of virgin females to mate with. We are lucky enough to have an annual colony of cicada killers right against our building at work, and it is unsettling to stand in the midst of these busy insects even for the knowledgeable among us. I’ve had plenty land on me as I sat in the middle of the lek, and I still get creeped out when they settle on my back where I can’t see them. Cicada killers are truly frightening to folks who don’t know what they are, but rest assured for all their size and hectic activity, they are wussies.

Males — the most conspicuous — cannot sting. Females can sting, but must be strongly provoked (or stepped on). Even so, as members of the wasp family Crabronidae, they have weak stings that, unless you are allergic, would feel like a pin prick and diminish within an hour.

It is high time for cicada killers now. They emerge in coincidence with cicadas, having overwintered underground, first as larvae in cocoons, then as a spring-developing pupae. Males emerge first, a week or so ahead of females. Unlike many insects, a female cicada killer will only mate once. Presumably once mated the females give off some scent that males detect when close by. I’ve seen males approach, knock over, or tackle females, but immediately fly off rather than try to mount them. Virgins, on the other hand, may find themselves in the midst of a determined, enthusiastic ball of males, one of which will win her over.

Once mated, females find an appropriate area, often a well-drained slope near a woodlot, and build a burrow up to three feet deep (not a typo). Our colony is in a border of fist-sized rocks on top of sandy soil next to a sidewalk. Burrows may have several branching nest chambers. In each, the female will place one or two paralyzed but living cicadas on which she will lay her eggs. Eggs are always laid under one of the second legs of the cicada, apparently the best spot for a little wasp larva to start eating.

The female cicada killer decides the sex of her offspring, because she stores sperm in a structure called a spermatheca, and uses the sperm to fertilize her eggs as she chooses. She will lay an unfertilized egg on a single cicada for a male, and a fertilized egg for a female; the fertilized eggs also get a second cicada. Since it is the females that have to hunt and carry around cicadas (which are much heavier than the wasp), they are bigger than males and need the extra provisions. Each female cicada killer will lay about a hundred eggs in a season, most of which will be males.

Even among males, there is size variation, depending on the size and condition of the cicada they were provided with as a larva. Paralyzed cicadas usually remain “fresh,” but the situation is complicated by rivalry for the cicada itself. Certain species of fly wait at the entrance of the cicada killer’s burrow in order to lay their own eggs on the paralyzed cicada. In this case, the fly larvae compete for the food source.

In less than three weeks after they emerge, males die. The females live four to five weeks, giving them time to construct and provision their nest burrows. Underfoot, cicada killer larvae slowly consume their rations. It will be another year before a new generation appears, intriguing some of us, and fooling others to fear them.

Many thanks to Prof. Chuck Holliday’s Cicada Killer Page, a one-stop source for all kinds of life history and research data on these fascinating insects.

Please don’t molest a colony of cicada killers. If you need to know more about why they are harmless and why dousing them with a load of pesticides is ineffective in the long run, check out Joe Coelho’s web site; he’s a colleague of Holliday.

Top photo: Male cicada killer, on the lookout. Center: Potential hapless victim, a Swamp Cicada (Tibicen chloromera). Bottom: Female cicada and co-worker’s hiking boot. All photos by Yours Truly, All Rights Reserved.

Mother Jones is one of my favorite magazines.  The last page of the July/August issue has a graphic titled "The New Math of Global Warming."  Some of the equations are have a much broader application and are timeless.  Here are my favorites:

This issue also has a stomach-turning article on off-roaders using an obscure old law to claim that thousands of miles of trails and paths — including those on private and public land — are open to motorized vehicles. Please read.

I’ve been tagged with the eight random facts meme by Birders on the Border.

1. I sit down in public toilets (one day, I will write an entire post about my thoughts on this topic).
2. In the fourth grade, I tested with a ninth grade vocabulary (as high as the test went at the time) but I refused to be promoted a grade or put in special classes.
3. I hate those useless, stupid bread-bag tags. What happened to twist ties?
4. Occupations of my closest friends: college professor, medical lab tech, elevator repairman, cop, environmental ed (3), zookeeper, museum collections manager, photographer (2), IRS agent, doctor, student, magazine editor.
5. I tend to think I’m not very likable because I’m blunt and opinionated.
6. This is one of three blogs I write for pretty regularly. I have a couple more private ones.
7. One of my (publicly-admittible) vices is celebrity gossip.  Where else but TMZ could you read a sentence like, “Wearing a tie-dye patterned satin mini made from curtains at the Days Inn Tehran [and] carrying a ‘My Lil’ Kidney’ purse…”
8. I’m getting LASIK done in November.

I don’t really like tagging people with memes…and most of the bloggers in our corner of the world seem to have done this one already.  However, I  think my friends at Birder’s World Field of View write a blog that is way too serious for their personalities. I’m going to mix it up: Jess and Chuck, post 8 random facts about each other.  Matt and Ernie, do the same for each other.

Try to slip a pizza ad in our door, and you’ll be forced to provide a belly rub.

One place I’ve been meaning to get to — not only to survey for birds but just from my interest in Detroit history — is the neighborhood in midtown called Brush Park. Brush Park was once one of Detroit’s most exclusive and wealthy neighborhoods. Revival plans have faltered, and the majority of the Victorian mansions crumbled and decayed. Finally, this area is undergoing restoration and revitalization.

Kingfisher and I made straight for one of Brush Park’s most famous residences, the William Livingstone mansion. It was one of Albert Kahn’s first designs, and was built in 1893. It originally stood a few blocks away, and was moved around 1990 to its present location, having been saved from demolition by preservationists. Unfortunately, the site was not well prepared, and the structure began to slouch.  This process has accelerated the last few years, and it’s now known locally as “Old Slumpy.” The anticipated date of its complete collapse is the basis of many betting pools. A few months ago, the facade fell off.  The end can’t be far away, so we were anxious to see it.

By the way, we confirmed Chimney Swifts nesting in the chimney. Old Slumpy has residents after all! It’s well worth checking out these links for additional info and pictures:

• A photo history from International Metropolis, one of my fav blogs, including the house in its more original condition.
• Wikipedia, with links.
• Absolute Michigan provides lots of links about Slumpy, including an amazing recent video of the actively sloughing facade.

There are not many houses per block in Brush Park.  Two blocks over was this monstrosity of an apartment house, complete with turrets. Most of the windows as well as the front door were open to whom or whatever might need or want shelter. A number of people have told me Turkey Vultures nest in some of these abandoned buildings, but vultures have an aversion to human disturbance, so I’d guess they prefer taller structures that are more securely boarded up than this one.

Things were a bit better a block or so away. Below is a beautifully restored mansion at 291 Edmund Place (check it out on Google Earth to get a feel for the ‘hood). Built in 1882, it’s now four condos, ranging in price from (sit down), $239,000 to $395,000.

We were told by a homeowner nearby that it takes about a half million to renovate these structures, but please, the price of these condos is a bit ahead of the rest of the area.  Here is 291 Edmund Place in context with its closest neighbors:

Note the tree-fronted place three doors down. It’s a real fixer-upper:

And the view from your front window is…expansive. Although you can see General Motors headquarters at the RenCen, and Ford Field, home of the Detroit Lions. To the left are some new developments as well. And there are pheasants crowing from these lots, too!

We ended up with a few more surprising birds: a Cooper’s Hawk being pursued by an American Kestrel, and two different Gray Catbirds defending their territories.

However, we actually spent most of our day in a different area of the city where we explored some rough areas, including a cemetery with the sign on the left. It’s adjacent to another one of Detroit’s spectacular ruins, the abandoned Packard Motor Car plant (also designed by Albert Kahn).  It was the last really under-surveyed section of the city we needed to visit, and we picked up over 20 species. Not bad for a place where we didn’t feel comfortable leaving the vicinity of the car.

Overall, a culturally interesting and biologically satisfying day of field work in the urban jungle.

There are pros and cons to being the coordinator for a big field project. The upside is that I get to spend a lot of time in the field myself. The downside is that it is often in places that volunteers don’t want to cover. Sometimes it turns out to be interesting; it’s how I ended up exploring Detroit’s urban prairie. This week I got stuck doing areas in some of Detroit’s older blue-collar suburbs, miles and miles of nothing but endless residential streets of small homes, bordered by commercial streets of stores and strip malls. Actually, the urban prairie areas in the city have more habitat.

I previewed my destination on Google Earth, and therefore sought out a lone green spot in a sea of homes: a triangle of trees wedged up hard against the interstate. It was a park, with a little picnic shelter, an expanse of unkept lawn, and a little woodlot. I picked up a few decent birds, such as Cooper’s Hawk, Red-eyed Vireo, and Indigo Bunting, although I could barely hear myself think with the freeway noise. Soon, I was more interested in the insect life.

All around the trunks of the oaks, dead ashes, and maples in the lawn area were dozens of moths. I realized what they were before I netted one: gypsy moths. Most seemed to be males. I wandered about a bit, looking for females, larvae, or egg cases.  At the base of one living oak, I noticed a lot of nickel-sized holes (there are over two dozen in the photo).

Gypsy moth larvae are defoliators, so they had nothing to do with the holes in the tree. The emerald ash borers that killed the ashes are minute creatures that create exit holes barely wider than a pencil lead. The thick bark around many of the holes was flaked away, perhaps indicating an exit of some force. I leaned in for a closer look.

In the nearest hole, I could see something sticking out.  Brown
and papery, it appeared to be an empty pupae. I grabbed a corner and began extracting it, going slowly and carefully so it wouldn’t tear.

I was astonished that it just seemed to keep coming and coming. Finally, I was holding a pretty revolting-looking pupae a whopping 6 cm long. It was molded mostly in the shape of an abdomen, which looked like a moth abdomen —  it reminded me of a sphinx moth. The head area was split open but did not resemble a moth pupae much to me, as the wing impressions were absent (or so reduced that I could not see them without my reading glasses!). I extracted another one and explored a little more before I left. I found not other trees with holes, or any moths or other insects large enough to be responsible for this damage or to be former tenants of the pupae.

Part of what I enjoy about photographing insects is the challenge of identifying them. Frankly, I had never heard of a humungous wood-boring moth. Impatient to know what I’d found, I called my buddy Mark, the coolest entomologist ever. Although his specialty is wasps and dragonflies, he was only stumped for a minute, and spewed out a Latin name which meant nothing to me. We both reached for a reference, which confirmed his guess. I’d found evidence of Prionoxystus robiniae, the Carpenterworm Moth (Hodges#2693).

These moths look a bit like sphinx moths, but are unrelated. Instead, they are in the same family which brings us the worm found in the bottom of a bottle of mescal or tequila. The larvae of the Carpenterworm Moth take three years to fully develop, apparently smell like goats, and can sometimes be seen peeping out of their holes in summer when they are getting ready to undergo metamorphosis. I think, given the photo I found of a mature larvae, that would have probably grossed me out a bit.  I would have been hard pressed to distinguish this from a big, disgusting beetle grub.

I’ve tramped through a lot of woodlots and tend to be quite observant, yet this is the first time I’ve encountered this insect, or the remains of one. Although this area is full of older homes (1940s to 1960s), there really aren’t a lot of mature trees, except in this woodlot. It must have one of the only concentrations of food for the gypsy moths and the Prionoxystus for miles. 

I’ll try to do a follow up visit in a week or so.

Larva photo by James Solomon, USDA Forest Service, Bugwood.org.

The phrase, “live fast, die young” could be dedicated to shrews. These small carnivorous mammals have supercharged metabolisms, and spend all their waking moments hunting and eating. Despite being quite numerous in the right habitat, shrews are rarely encountered — alive, anyway. I typically find shrews post-mortem, lying in the path in front of me as if they had just simply given up the ghost mid-stride. Actually, that may be the case for those I’ve found, like the one in the photo. Shrews usually live less than 16 months and with a heart rate measured at 800 beats a minute, I think they just burn themselves right out.

A lifeless shrew, then, is the antithesis of what shrews are all about.  So I was fortunate indeed last week when I not only encountered a living shrew, but a congregation of shrews. Shrews are generally solitary animals, territorial and aggressive toward their own kind. The common shrew in my area, the Masked Shrew (Sorex cinereus), is noted for being especially voracious and intolerant of companionship. I had paused to listen for a bird song when I heard a persistent rustling in the leaf litter off the trail. I glanced over, and saw a shrew darting from a fallen log to a tangle of vines. The next moment, another scooted through the dried leaves. A few feet away, a sleek pointed snout poked out from under a shard of bark, then quickly disappeared. Over the next few minutes, I watched the speedy comings and goings of at least four animals before the forest floor returned to silence. Yes, I knew this was a special occurrence, because this experience was the second in my field career.

Ten years ago, I happened upon the same type of trailside hubbub. That time, I found myself standing amid at least two dozen energetic shrews. They covered an area of about 20 square feet, and ran chasing each other under leaves, over logs, across my boots, in and out of dappled sunlight.  And they were all squeaking at each other in high, whistled voices (most species communicate through vocalization, and Masked Shrews also use echolocation). Despite their quick, zig-zagging actions, their activity did not seem frantic, but vigorous and spirited.

As you may have guessed, these shrew aggregations are presumed to be mating parties, but little is known about the behavior as it is seldom observed (my list of literature and references therein make up most of the published accounts). How did they know to meet in this place?  How did they know when?  How could these furtive, thumb-sized mammals carry on their spring rites, fearless of the tremors of footsteps and the not-so-quiet presence of a huge human?

And how privileged am I to twice have had the opportunity to see this rare, delightful insight into the lives of these secretive animals?

Hieshetter, D. 1972. A concentration of masked shews in Ingham County, Michigan. Jack-Pine Warbler 88:63.

Maier, T. J. and Doyle, K. L. 2006.  Aggregations of masked shrews (Sorex cinereus): density related mating behavior? Mammalia 86-89.

Vispo, C. R. 1988. An observation of a wild group of masked shrews, Sorex cinereus.  Canadian Field- Naturalist 102:731-733.

Woodfenden, G. E. 1959. An unusual concentration of Sorex cinereus. Journal of Mammology 40: 437.

I received an awesome book just in time for summer: The Songs of Insects by Lang Elliott and Wil Hershberger. This gorgeous book provides species accounts for 75 North American crickets, katydids, and cicadas, and includes an audio CD of the songs of each of them.

Introductory material includes chapters on the biology of insect songs, human perception, appreciation and aesthetics, and understanding sonograms.  Each group of insects (e.g., true katydids, cicadas) is preceded by a short overview, with an emphasis on singing behavior. The section on cicadas includes maps of each of the twelve broods of the 17-year cicada (Magicicada septendecim), with the years of the last two and next two emergences for each.  Having experienced the spectacle of Brood X in 2004, I can enthusiastically advise you to look at the maps and plan a trip to the next emergence near you.

Each species account has several beautiful, detailed photos of the featured insect, a range map, a sonogram, and a brief description of the insect and song.  The information is not overly technical or dense, but instead offers a few interesting and pertinent highlights regarding their appearance and behavior, and they are charmingly written. I cannot emphasize enough how stunning the photography is!

The audio CD has wonderful recordings of each insect and its calls and songs — now familiar songsters of the night have identities. For me, putting a name to an organism really enhances my appreciation and interest. There are also several tracks at the end from another upcoming CD, Insect Concertos, which is one-hour of non-narrated insect choruses.

Lang Elliott is well-known for other excellent “audio field guides” such as Know Your Bird Sounds and The Calls of Frogs and Toads, among many others. Wil Hershberger is an incredible photographer. I can’t think of anybody else who could do such a spectacular job on such a book.  I have a wonderful field guide to orthopterans — Field Guide To Grasshoppers, Katydids, And Crickets Of The United States — but The Songs of Insects, while not a field guide per se, is nonetheless my hands-down favorite.

This book is a must for any nature lover, and it’s a bargain at under $14.00 at Amazon. I am really looking forward to mid-summer when I can put this to book and CD to use. Highly recommended.