Once the pollinators and other flying insects began to die off I started focusing on beetles and ants. I am actually having more fun with this and I’ve found quite a few uncommon species. I also never realized how many ant species call Long Island home!
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Oh my, the Arthropods on Snow project is just what I needed. In recent winters I’ve collected quite a few and they always surprise me. I’ve just signed up for your project and I’ll be adding something as soon as I have a moment to put the images together. For the first time, I actually sort of look forward to the arrival of snow!
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It’s @erikamitchell 's project, to give credit where credit is due. She has uploaded an awe-inspiring number of observations / species to the project! With outstanding leaders like that, it helps keep me motivated to increase my own numbers each season. I may not have a chance of ever catching up, but it goes to show there’s a lot more out there to be found.
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I’d love to find a cast off microscope. I’ve been collecting the insect wings left behind by our resident mocking birds and would love to have a closer look than my loupe gives. Great idea!
Anyone know a source for cheap or free 'scopes?
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I feel the same! The last few seasons I started a few projects:
- Tagging all my photos of living things in Lightroom (photo app) with nested taxonomical keywords (online platforms come & gasp go, so I want my own tags, backed up in triplicate)
- Creating albums of best representative shot of each species (which I keep on my devices, offline, for reference outside cell networks—which is most of my area)
- Created a project for the moths in my state here on iNat & started identifying pages of really old observations with help of kind mentors.
- Taking photos at our bird feeders (good binocs, best investment ever!)
- Reading books about my favorite taxa
Another iNat moth-er told me her goal was to photograph at least one moth every month of the year, which she has done for years (using blacklights, bait, etc). She’s in the northern US.
Don’t despair,
“If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” —Percy Bysshe Shelley
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Look up any school microscope, cheap even when new.
Thanks!
Well, I suppose that’s better than Charlie Brown’s outlook:
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@fffffffff’s has a similar topic for a bioblitz during this time of year. Maybe something that interests you will come up.
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Yes, it can.
(Not where I live, though. This is part of why I live where I live.)
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In between come to IDentiFridays (we need all hands on deck please)
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Winter in UK is a good time to find under-recorded insects. Things will be out there basking on a sunny winter day, even basking on snow, and some will be winter specialists that get missed by the warm weather entomologists. One of the British experts on beetles, Mark Telfer, did an analysis of his collecting success and he found he records fewer species per day in winter but he is more likely to find a species he hasn’t seen before.
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Oh hey, that’s cool. So based on this tip, I did a search of beetles in the Arthropods on Snow project, and while it’s not a frequently observed taxon, there are certainly a lot more species than I expected: 82 so far! Within those 82, a surprising number of them (24) are Staphylinidae, same as my sole beetle observation in the project. Since the rove beetle family is poorly represented in observations on iNat, that makes a nice target to look for more of this winter.
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I stopped by the museum where that journal was held, and they were kind enough to let me copy it. It is very long, so I put it in my journal. https://www.inaturalist.org/journal/neylon/71347-a-winter-walk This guy seems like he would be a fun guy to hit the field with.
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One of the coldest winters I ever spent was in north Florida during a freak cold spell in the 1980s. Poorly insulated house. The locals were pretty miserable but only lasted maybe a week. It was a weird introduction to the state for me as I’d just moved there.
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Oh yeah it can surprise people who think it’s all sunshine, sweater, and skeeters. Our average low the past few years during winter has hovered around 58 to 60F but I remember when it would dip into the mid 30s and I’d have to scrape frost off my car before driving to school.
You can still tell the seasons are transitioning just by how the air feels but it’s just not the same; you do eventually start sweating again if you remain outside.
The event I experienced was the January 1985 freeze that really impacted the South. As I recall it killed off the major orange orchards in central FL. Maybe they’re all housing tracts by now?
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Few remaining orchards unfortunately. And few maintained developments. Same story across several counties. We were rather famous for our citrus orchards but even they were bought out eventually.
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I started birding specifically because herps dry up in winter where I lived at the time.
Weird duck season it is!
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Up here in Sweden, winter is mainly lichens and mosses for me. And birds, if I care to bring my proper camera. Most of the vascular plants that retain their leaves and can be readily identified are common as dirt, so not much fun to observe those.
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