manicure

I hope you are in the mood for something variegated, and something fritillary, because that's what we came across in the alley. Hopefully it will look like this before long.

lull

dragon fly mudra

This dragonfly kindly posed for me, but before that, it stood on the gourd bud perch and steadily alternated various wing positions like a flag signaler. What was he telling me? That I was next up on the runway?

So do they speak to one another like that or was he just working out some kinks in his wing muscles? Double click image for closer view.

What a dump!

Signage on the fencing around the new visitor's center construction site at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden informed me that the garden was once Brooklyn's place of refuse. Something tells me that the philanthropist Alfred T. White had something to do with the parcel's staggering transformation into its current form. How often do such complete reversals happen? Now the lotuses that rise out of the murky pools there have added significance.

I wouldn't put this sort of miracle past White, but I can't say for sure because I haven't read the book about him, The Social Vision of Alfred T. White, published by Proteus Gowanus. Last time I checked the Brooklyn Public Library didn't have it in circulation.

This plant somewhere between the Tamarisk and the Butterfly Bushes swarmed with so many stinging insects I got a little queasy. There were wasps of diverse waistlines, various communal and solitary kinds of bees, several bee imitators, tiny bees the size of seed beads, diminutive butterflies and this Ermine Moth with whom I was very proud to share the refuge of a very lovely dump for a few minutes.

on milkweed, left and right

There was a plant on the left side of the yard that had drawn flies and a honey bee. When I looked I saw that the flies were dead, dangling in the wind like odd trophies, suspended by legs which they had been unable to extract from the flowers. What strong mechanism must allow the milkweed to trap such fine thread-like limbs. I prodded the honey bee, she didn't go anywhere, so I figured she was also a prisoner. Perhaps milkweed's embraces would kill this one too. I have only seen 4 honey bees so far this year and I snapped, got a seam ripper and a nail file and crushed the flowers until this one was free. Her feet were damaged and still bearing bits of the flowers which she tried to chew off. They didn't keep her from taking flight though, and soon she bumbled high over my head.

On the right side of the yard I've found no corpses dangling from the milkweed flowers. Perhaps they are slightly more generous or perhaps birds have already come along and pecked off the evidence. Over there I've frequently seen large bumble bees, smaller bees, syrphid flies and the attractive insect in coattails with attractive banded undergarments.

Gulliver

In the middle of a 5th Avenue crosswalk I found this unfortunate pilgrim upside down and clawing the air. At three inches in length, he was hard to miss. I slid him onto my notebooks and sat with him nearby for a few minutes - it didn't look good, he had a puncture to his upper abdomen and was only moving his front legs. Nevertheless I found a box in a trashcan to bring him home to Brooklyn. I carried him like a pizza delivery - on the Subway I suddenly heard his wings going full speed and thought maybe a little rest was all he needed. Walking home from the train I passed by a copy of Gulliver's Travels someone had stood against their fence for the taking, and thought that seemed a fitting name for one so large (and helpless.)

Once home he came out of the box to flap his wings more and make a go of it but, because only his front wings were working, he just went around in circles. We put him back in the box for protection and let him be. A while later I peered in the box and saw he was pretty much dead but pulled him out for a closer look. Out in the open air again he moved, somehow raising his thorax up as high as he could. In this ascending gesture he became something like an anthemia to life and left me wondering if the spirit of victory and death do not exclude one another, wondering if death is beautiful in a way one can't imagine.

creatures

I overheard some people talking about creatures and realized it's a very strange word coming out of such odd mouths as we humans have. But we can't help ourselves can we, given the compelling designs and definitive haecceities held by those crystallizations of organic matter we find ourselves among. Every spring I look forward to greeting the larval ladybugs I find on the spirea bush in front of the house, some say they look like spiny little alligators. This one took a break from devouring aphids and waved one of its tiny front legs at me. If it's lucky it will avoid itself becoming a snack for one of the birds that glean such things from trees and shrubs, like the warblers I saw this morning snacking on all varieties of immaculately green caterpillars. It's strange that these things that go so fast are, in a large measure, made of things that go so slow.

brooklyn exotic

I believe the woman appeared eager to show us the Madagascar Cockroaches on display at the Audubon Boathouse. There was something beyond beautiful in the contrast of the whitish pink of the highlights of her skin and the beetle's blue-black and auburn lacquered plates. She turned him over, "You want to see his face?" I looked, couldn't see a thing, the features of the beetle's face appeared to dissolve into the darkness.

From the ostentatious pose of her hand, I got the sense she'd rather wear the glossy imbrications of this armored creature than the sparkling facets of diamond.

Monday bonus: my most recent favorite Kvond quote:
“…in Spinoza the Indifference (if we can borrow the term) falls to Substance itself which contains all things as a Unity come out of its unbound nature, a pure affirmation without lack; thus for him the differentiation of essences expressed in an infinite number of Attributes flows from its sheerly immanent, determined and infinite nature.”

on a spirea twig

This tattered chrysalis turned up in a pile of cuttings on Sunday after my husband got out the loppers and hedged the seriously overgrown bush back when doldrums struck our stoop sale. I'd been wanting to come across one of these.

Next to this discovery, the best part of the sale was simply sitting in front of the house the entire day, inverting the status quo and getting to meet those sometimes most invisible creatures, the neighbors. One writes this blog, ecohearth. Good luck to him.

In honor of the only chrysalis I've come across since I can remember, here's an excerpt from Walter Otto by way of Marion Woodman's The Pregnant Virgin:

He who begets something which is alive must dive down into the primeval depths in which the forces of life dwell. And when he rises to the surface, there is a gleam of madness in his eyes because in those depths death lives cheek by jowl with life. The primal mystery is itself mad–the matrix of the duality, the unity of the disunity, ..The more alive this life becomes, the nearer death draws, until the supreme moment when something new is created–when death and life meet in an embrace of mad ecstasy. The rapture and terror of life are so profound because they are intoxicated with death. As often as life engenders itself anew the wall which separates it from death is momentarily destroyed...Life which has become sterile totters to meet its end, but love and death have welcomed and clung to one another passionately from the beginning.

Dionysus, page 151

6th Ave, Saturday Night

Accentor

The cicada's singing sounds of alien invasions as imagined by Hollywood, a pulsing martian's mind control ray. I wish I had a more sophisticated vocabulary of sonic principles to talk about how the note of buzzing radio static begun by one builds as a hidden chorus abandons itself to a gradual increase in pitch like emotional drunks on barstools before simmering down to a slowing arborial sizzle. The sounds seems to come from vibrating the abdomen, which seems very tricky to one who can't even hoola hoop.

Ermine Moth-Ailanthus Webworm

At Ocean Grove. The last one I saw was at the Salt Marsh in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn, on the land bought for its preservation by Alfred Tredway White and Charles Pratt.

Maybe the Ermine Moth came to Ocean Grove for the Christmas Pageant that will be held on the beach here tomorrow. He has the exotic looks of one of the three kings, is he packing myrrh?

There's a book called Snowbound by John Greenleaf Whittier on the shelf of this rental house we're staying in with my husband's family. Apparently he's very well known in my parent's generation but scarcely heard of in mine, and among those who know of him I suspect he might be more famous for his cozy rhyming than for his abolitionism. And who knew, Ethan Allen is a poet, as well as patriot and furniture store! One of Whittier's poems, The Song of the Vermonters, 1779, was wrongly attributed to Allen for 60 years. Yes, I've been reading Wikipedia again, and you know what else? This poet was color blind and couldn't tell ripe from unripe strawberries, so it's probably a good thing he was too frail for farming.

Daddy Longlegs

Or Harvestmen, of the order Opiliones, named in 1833 by Swedish Naturalist Karl Sundevall. No one seems to know why he invoked the Latin for shepherd, Opilio. They've changed little in the last 400 million years. Just think, all that time without a name.

Not spiders, these arthropods have only one body part, making them walking cephalopds. But I understand the Greek for "head-feet" has been claimed by those swimming head-feet, the Octopi and their mullosk kin.

This unidentified member of Opiliones is one of many seen on the slopes of Rattlesnake Mountain in Raymond, Maine. If anyone has seen one in Brooklyn, I'd love to know. I never have.

Ephemeroptera

"The mayfly belongs to group 1 taxa, or pollution–sensitive animals. This means if mayflies are in or around the water, the water should be of a good quality.^[3]" (Wikipedia)

Fast clocks! As adults, they live from a few day to a few hours.

Around Sebago

A caterpillar with stripes similar to those of a snake I saw on the dock yesterday. In case you wondered, that's not my tongue it's found its way to.















A firefly? If so these Northern ones play up the stripes.












A pale green insect trying to get in the house, a slow moving tannin-dyed stream in the woods behind the lake. I suppose the color comes from leaves in decay.












No frogs around. One summer years ago there were buckets of them. I miss them. Victims of Chemlawn perhaps? Many yards around here suspiciously large and green.

I saw a Kingfisher fly over the lake.

Polyphemus

Polyphemus, the name of a cyclops, means famous. At first I thought this was the caterpillar of a Luna Moth, but those are spottier. This looks to be the last instar of the late summer brood of this variety of Giant Silk Moth (Saturniidae,) and it may winter in its chrysalis. I wish we'd kept it, but we took it to an Oak in Prospect Park, worried that it wouldn't last the hot dry sidewalk of Ft. Hamilton it was about to cross.

After the disappearance of the Parsley Worm our dill plant hosted last week, I don't want to take so many chances with caterpillars anymore, the are too precious. The worms have me wrapped around their fingers. Here's what this beauty will look like if she makes it.

Instars

I took the top picture last year, calling it Rue Beastie because I had no idea what it was. I saw the same thing 3 days ago on a dill plant, since then it's grown into what I'm sure is a Parsely Worm, which will morph into an Eastern Tiger Swallowtail if all goes in its favor. This is not every day animation, the forms of larval arthropods are tricky. They don't seem to wear the same clothes in every episode. The little beastie is spikey, but the spikes will give way to rolling hills of baby fat unlike no other.

"Instar" seems like such a corporate word for a phase in the development of a caterpillar. Who is responsible for that choice? Well, at least it resonates with avatar, and ties into the whole transformer mythos that young ones get loopy about, for good reason, I'm sure it's in the genes, and parents like it too, because we need constant reminders that "it's just a phase," the little horns will retract and the thorns of irrationality will get swallowed up in the fat of wisdom. So, you know, enjoy the freak show while it lasts.

From Wikipedia:
An instar is a developmental stage of arthropods, such as insects, between each moult (ecdysis), until sexual maturity is reached. Arthropods must shed the exoskeleton in order to grow or assume a new form. Differences between instars can often be seen in altered body proportions or changes in the number of body segments. Some arthropods can continue to molt after sexual maturity, but these subsequent molts are generally not called instars.

Ladybug instars I observed on 11th Avnue, here.

fanatics

love in the garden

Sunday around the Boathouse