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I have found my first Snow Bunting, my first Coil Worm (which is one of 517 observations here), and my first Purple Beautyberry, which doubles as the first in the area!
(snow bunting)
(coil worm)
(purple beautyberry)
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Found a beetle that looked very much like caterpillar frass:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/190022767
Treehoppers never disappoint:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/190022769
And just as I was packing up I spotted this leggy fellow:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/190022771
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Uploaded more observations from my summer trip to the USA over the past week. Ended up with 196 life list firsts from two days of photos:
Favorite life list addition is Eryngium yuccifolium (Rattlesnake Master):
Runner-up (and favorite life list first from Animalia) is Trachelas tranquillus (Broad-faced Sac Spider):
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I decided to go to the Dunkirk area on a whim on Friday and Saturday. Here, Alca torda found in the port just in front of the ice rink. There were three of them diving while getting harassed by gulls. Add to that migrating geese, seals and all sorts of shorebirds and I think it took me one hour after arriving to never want to go back home.
My habit of walking everywhere came back to bite me and now I’m basically too sore and tired to do anything. That said, my free trial of my photo editing software ends today, so it’s going to be a mad dash to sort out all of my photos.
Edit: One of my two SD cards is apparently corrupted (shows up as unpartitioned). Desperately trying to recover the data, especially a probable lifer bunting I had yet to ID, not to mention most of my good seal photos. I should have backed up everything when I got home last night, I hate myself.
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Oh my, tech glitches are just maddening. I hope you find a fix for your SD card - I would like to see your bunting!
You had a really good day with some wonderful experience and memories!
You could upload your bunting observation with a sketch, if you like drawing.
It is okay to upload an observation without media, preferably including a good text description. I believe such would be a Casual observation, but I think it still goes to your life list (correct me if that is not so).
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Thank you for the kind words and perfect timing, I had just managed to recover the data. I think the SD card failure is a hardware one, it only works in the camera or on the computer about 1 out of 20 times, so I kept trying until I was able to back up everything. This was absolutely nerve-racking.
As I suspected, a snow bunting, which apparently isn’t the same family as either North American or Old World buntings. A local birder had told me he was looking for them and I just randomly stumbled upon one as I was leaving the site.
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https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/190214664 A Giant gray moth was a pleasant find.
Along with this Texas Gray
and what I presume to be a Red-bordered Emerald
On the plant side of things,
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A few days ago, I found Bryocamptus minutus, a small copepod living in moss. Not only is it the first time I have observed it, but apparently also the first time it has been observed on iNat. I never had that happen before, so I was very excited.
Also, I observed a mushroom Mycetinis alliaceus that had very long and slender stalks and smelled like garlic (hence the name). I think it is a very neat fungus (and probably my favourite (apart from those I eat, haha).
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I found a Phaeophyscia nigricans! The story is someone in the discord lichen channel told me about this species and so over the next days you could see me in the city every night crouched down along sidewalks and park walls with a flashlight and lens examining the surfaces. I never found any P. nigricans though. On Friday I went to an old cemetery I had never been to before and was immediately disappointed when I saw that all the grave stones had been treated or scrubbed clean to kill off any and all lichen. I still decided to walk through and look around and one of the graves had a somewhat fragile looking stone statue with a stone ball on its head and I noticed some lichen growing on top of that ball - the green one turned out to be Phaeophyscia nigricans! (Also, no sooner was I done taking pictures a guard walked up to me and told me to leave because they are closing the gate for the day…)
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That’s a pretty neat looking lichen! I don’t know much about them, but I love looking for them and taking photos of them.
What did you use to get that macro shot? It’s very impressive how zoomed-in and detailed it is.
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Thanks, it is, I love those fine lobes at the end, so delicate. It’s also one of the few lichens which tolerate polluted city air.
A TG-6 in microscope mode (resting the lens on the stone ball to avoid motion blur, the curvature of the ball worked in my favor there - getting a shot from above would have been much harder since my hands shake too much).
Haven’t uploaded it yet but I got a common goldeneye and a pied-bill grebe which are vulnerable in my neck of the woods
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I’m just starting out in ID world, but I am excited about finding a Ganoderma lucidum, Reishi, Lacquered Bracket fungus. One of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. I am hoping to do a continuous data gathering of all the species on one small community plot. An exciting project for next year.
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Welcome to the forum! Lovely fungus, thanks for sharing.
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Finished uploading my photos from the United States this week and added one bird, three insects, and three plants to my life list.
Favorite lifer from Animalia is Junonia coenia (Common Buckeye):
Favorite lifer from Plantae is Glycyrrhiza lepidota (wild licorice):
I’ve also been working on uploading my backlog of photos from South Korea after returning home. Spent a lot of time checking out a small road tunnel on the edge of town and have been getting a few new lifers from that.
Favorite moth find has been Deilephila elpenor (Elephant Hawkmoth):
Runner-up is Bizia aexaria (no English common name; the Korean common name 끝갈색가지나방 translates to ‘Brown-tipped Geometer Moth’ but the coloration has me wanting to call it the much more fanciful ‘bruised banana moth’):
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I saw a flying squirrel! Didn’t manage a photograph before it went into a hollow in the tree, but I saw one! Out in east Texas. Was very excited.
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Bruised banana moth is such an excellent name! Lovely photos, thank you for sharing.
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As things start to freeze up at night I’ve moved to some new hunting grounds. So far, my favourite has been the local cemetery which I can take short walks through while doing errands in town. It’s where I found my first (rare) Bolas spider on top of a tombstone a couple weeks ago, and this week (mid-November, Ontario!) I added several more lifers by doing this.
I’ve noticed a few others here who have discovered rare lichens and other species by doing their own cemetery circuit and it makes sense. These areas are relatively protected and undisturbed (aside from lawn and shrub maintenance) for smaller species. The stones themselves seem to attract a lot of flies while offering nooks for hiding spiders and wasps.
This isn’t technically a lifer, but actually my second sighting, the other one a week ago in a park a few miles away. But that makes two observations of this species for me. Two out of four for all of Canada.
Tromatobia ovivora
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/190738159
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I’m used to seeing cocoyams in all sorts of tropical locales, usually as a food crop. So, doing IDs for Araceae, I was rather alarmed to see how extensively it has invaded North America, especially in the Gulf states, but also along the Atlantic seaboard. I wouldn’t have thought it was that frost hardy!
This week, I found one of those invasive populations right here, along Green Mill Run. But that isn’t my favorite lifer. I’ve seen it too many times in too many places ever to think of it as a lifer anywhere. While I was creating the observation, though, I noticed that they were infected with a leaf spot pathogen:
Link to observation
There are several leaf spot pathogens that infect cocoyams. Fortunately, it is such an important food crop that its deseases have been well-studied and -characterized, with ample information on distinguishing one from another. For now, I’m inclined to say it is the one called “ghost spot,” but I also considered taro leaf blight. Whichever it turns out to be, it will be my favorite lifer this week regardless.
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