birds_bugs_botany's Favorites

Credit goes to @pcareless for finding these beauties! I was looking at some half frozen Crematogaster sp. under a rock when I looked over and noticed that Phil was eating some things off the ground. He turned to me and said "Try this tasty crunch moss!" I assumed he was suffering from March Madness but he was right! They had the sweet crunchy tang of Buxbaumia! It was then that we came up with the idea for our forthcoming field guide entitled "A guide to identifying mosses by shoving them in your mouth"

Plains Emerald...? -> ! At Nashville Conservation Reserve, Kleinberg ON. Habitat was a long-grass type area interspersed with rows of younger planted pines. Short appendages, yellow face, pattern and colour match. Basal plate match.

Stems with outer hyalodermis, single costa terminating beyond mid-leaf, truncated leaf cells, non-plicate leaves; calcareous fen along shoreline of Lake Huron. Specimen keys well but I have no previous experience with this species.

I spent ~3 hours exploring the area around where this cicada was recently reported. I heard the first one probably within 10 minutes of getting here, but wandered around looking for more and making observations of other taxa. I heard more than 5 individuals, including about 4 at once, so there is definitely a population here. Unfortunately they were all high up and out of reach for me to catch them. My camera battery died before I found one visually so I resorted to photographing it with my phone through my binoculars.

Most individuals were in the willow/walnut savannah floodplain around the creek, which has hemlocks on either side, although I did hear one in a more upland pine forest area nearby.

They were singing sporadically, I'm guessing related to the many cloudy periods.

I went back the next day and got a better recording, couldn't find any visually though: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/51855666