I’m noticing a marked decline in butterflies, bees, wasp, etc in my neighborhood this year. Last April I saw 60 odd species in my neighborhood in April; this year I’m at like 24 or 25 so far. I was wondering if other Texas inatters were seeing similar things?
I’ve only started really paying attention last year too though, so maybe annual fluctuations are normal and it wasn’t the freeze?
there are definitely fewer individuals of some species, but i’m also noticing a lot of species that i don’t remember seeing in the past. the plants definitely seem to be acting weird, too, and i suspect that probably had a lot to do with the late deep freeze. if the plants are off, i’m not surprised there might be ripples all the way down the food chain. but then i also did notice a ton of robins and yellow rumped warblers this year – more so than usual. not sure why that seemed to be the case, but maybe an explosion of invertebrate predators might be responsible for suppressing the invertebrate population, too?
Yeah plants are definitely weird; I even lost a fair chunk of my native stuff (Turk’s caps got hit hard), and lots of things are just now really coming back
Seems like I am seeing less but I have been mothing so heavy since the pandemic started, its hard to compare my past observations numbers. I have more invert species and observations this year than same period the last few years. My moth sheet certainly isn’t very exciting lately.
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