Nature Moncton Nature
News
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well as any naturalist in New Brunswick or beyond, are invited to share their
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Proofreading courtesy of
Louise Nichols at nicholsl@eastlink.ca
**Fifteen
members joined last evening’s Nature Moncton Wednesday Night Walk at the Tucker
Street Ducks Unlimited lagoons, led by Judy Cairns and Dale Pugh. Judy shared some interesting history on the
area and how the lagoons came to be.
The weather was perfect and the views spectacular. Special sightings included a bald eagle on the hunt, a beaver, a great blue heron, swallows feasting on mosquitoes, toads, greater yellowlegs, short-billed dowitchers, a few busy beavers, and many
ducks, geese, and birds. A slug hitched
a ride on a member’s sneaker before being gently placed in a safe spot off the trail.
(Editor’s
note: The weather cooperated perfectly with moderate temperatures and a breeze,
with nonstop observations and the perfect sunset to terminate a great evening
with Mother Nature and comradeship.)
**Brian
Stone sends photos from the Nature Moncton Wednesday Night Walk that
took place at the Tucker St. Ducks Unlimited ponds in clear weather with the
participation of many mosquitoes. Photos include some of the many vocal yellowlegs
as well as barn swallows, an immature cedar waxwing, great
blue herons, an immature bald eagle, some ducks flying past,
and a relaxed-looking beaver. The sunset was exceptional.
**Greg
Vanderknapp photographed a red-necked phalarope in juvenile plumage at the
Salisbury Highland Park lagoon area on Wednesday.
This is very
much a pelagic bird, but occasional sightings are not unexpected, as small
numbers of red-necked phalaropes do seem to turn up at sewage lagoons
and wetlands in NB during migration. Another was reported recently at the
Hampton Lagoon.
Greg also
got a nice photo of a Wilson’s snipe that posed for him at the Salisbury
Highland Park lagoon on Wednesday.
** The warm
days of August have the cicadas emerging from the ground to head up into tall
trees to loudly emit characteristic vocalizations on their mating missions.
Bev
Schneider was in the right place at the right time with a camera to photograph a
dog-day cicada emerging from its exoskeleton.
The cicada
undergoes incomplete metamorphosis, skipping the pupal (cocoon) stage entirely.
They hatch as nymphs that crawl from the ground to quickly head up trees on
their mission. They shed their old skin (exoskeleton) to emerge as adults,
which was captured in Bev’s photograph.
**The large
sphinx moths have often completed their mating mission by August, and we see
little of them.
However,
Terry Power had a fresh laurel sphinx visit his Hardwicke home on
Wednesday. This sphinx can double-brood in a season, so this may be the reason
a fresh one is appearing in August.
Terry also
took note of a brown marmorated stink bug that is easily identified by
its characteristic alternating light and dark bands along the sides of the
abdomen and a white band on the antennae.
**Katie Girvan had a colourful virgin tiger moth land on her shirt and it was quite content to stay there no matter how many times she put it on a leaf or branch or even the porch light. It kept coming back and just sitting and vibrating on her shirt. It stayed on her hand for a few minutes until she passed it off to the porch light.
**Brian Stone managed to get some photos of the different stages of the partial solar eclipse that took place on Wednesday afternoon. He didn't manage to expose all the photos equally, and he missed some stages due to cloud interference, but he put the best images he got together in a composite image to show the progress of the partial eclipse.
(Editor’s
note: It was truly an amazing sight to put on solar viewing glasses and watch
this astronomical phenomenon take place.)
**Brian
Stone stayed up late on Wednesday night and into the early hours of Thursday to
watch for meteors from the yearly Perseid meteor shower. He was hoping
to get a photograph of one, and he had some success as a moderately bright one
showed up on one of his cell phone photos, taken with the 4-minute
time-exposure astrophotography setting. Visually, he saw only 11 meteors in the
time that he was out watching, after the clouds cleared up. Obviously, he
missed the peak of the shower.
Nelson Poirier
Nature Moncton
