Nature Moncton Nature News: August 12 2025

NATURE MONCTON NATURE NEWS

August 12, 2025

Nature Moncton members as well as any naturalist in New Brunswick or beyond are invited to share their photos and descriptions of recent nature sightings to build a fresh (almost) daily edition of Nature News

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Please advise the editor at nelsonpoirier435@gmail.com if any errors are noted in wording or photo labelling.

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Proofreading courtesy of Louise Nichols at nicholsl@eastlink.ca

**Norbert Dupuis visited Johnson’s Mills Nature Conservancy Interpretation Centre shorebird site on Monday afternoon at high tide to get some special photos of the action there, looking like it might be prime time. The species is predominantly the semipalmated sandpiper at the moment. Norbert photographed the large flocks, as well as a close-up of some on a branch. Lucky photo!

**Apparently, Miramichi was one of the hottest places in Canada on Monday at 37.2 °C, if not the hottest. Peter and Deana Gadd’s “Warbler Fall” was again a very busy spot for birds requiring a drink of water and, in some cases, a bath. Pretty well all the visiting birds had their beaks open most of the time, presumably to help them cool down. Two examples are a northern cardinal female and a song sparrow. A new warbler guest on Monday was a chestnut-sided warbler that couldn’t seem to get enough as it returned for a splashing “good time” five or six times over the early evening.

**While watering her garden Sunday evening, Chris Antle was accompanied by a magnificent male monarch butterfly, which she photographed.

(Editor's note: The pheromone spots that identify it as a male are arrowed.)
A female was in her milkweed patch on Monday morning. Due to the searing temperatures, Chris hasn’t spent the usual amount of time searching for eggs and caterpillars, but a quick count is 15 at various stages of maturity. She found it interesting to observe several feeding on the newly formed seed pods.

**Rheal Vienneau saw a good-sized leopard frog in a wet spot near his garden hose before it hopped away to hide. The nearest wetland is the marsh behind his house, about 300ft away, but it is dried up because of the drought. Obviously, frogs somehow sense wet areas during a drought. Rheal has found very small frogs and toads in the same area recently.

**Brian Stone was able to photograph the alignment of Venus and Jupiter at dawn this morning.

**Lisa Morris submitted a photo of the cocoon of a cicada on Aug 8 which BugGuide has identified as the dog-day cicada (Neotibicen canicularis).

(Editor’s note: This is one of our more common ‘singing’ insects. The relatively large adult male is now singing (stridulating) loudly from the tops of trees, especially white pine. The song is a loud, high-pitched whine, which can be likened to a power saw cutting wood that lasts several seconds and is very obvious on these hot days. The pitch of the song starts off low, gets higher, and then fades away at the end.

Our second most common cicada is the say’s cicada, and its song is a continuous winding buzz, staying fairly consistent all the way through.

It is therefore fairly easy to tell these two apart by their song.

Nelsonpoirier435@gmail.com

Nelson Poirier

Nature Moncton