NATURE MONCTON NATURE NEWS
August 12, 2025
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**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.
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.
**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.
Nelson Poirier
Nature Moncton
