Photo of the Week

National Moth Week ended yesterday. The weather cleared up towards the end of last week, so I was able to put in an evening of mothing on Wednesday night. I hope any readers that wanted to were able to get to a mothing event or do one on their own. If you missed it, well, moths are present year-round in many places, and there is still time this summer to set up a outdoor light for an evening. Many of the organizations that accepted data from National Moth Week events also accept data year-round.

Because moths are such a large group, interested amateurs can contribute useful information. Take the moth above, the Deep Yellow Euchlaenia (Euchlaena amoenaria). This moth is fairly common and widespread through eastern North America, as one can see from the map at the Moth Photographers Group. Despite this, it seems that its larval host plant is still unknown, and there are no images of caterpillars for this species at either BugGuide or MPG. Many other species lack complete range information.

Even though this is a common and widespread moth, I was excited to see this land on my sheet last Wednesday since it was a new species for me.

Loose Feathers #402

Common Tern and chicks / USFWS Photo

Birds and birding

• The US Fish and Wildlife Service plans to kill 3,603 Barred Owls at four study locations in the Pacific Northwest to see if removing Barred Owls will help the Northern Spotted Owl population recover. Barred Owls have occupied the Northern Spotted Owl's range as the latter's population declined and crashed.
• The New Yorker has a long article on obsessive egg collectors and the British conservationists that try to catch them. The police and the RSPB have cooperated on a program called Operation Easter that monitors known collectors and runs regular sting operations.
• The wood rail at Bosque del Apache in New Mexico has drawn a lot of birders from around the country.
• The development of the environmental movement is closely tied to the popularization of birdwatching.
• The situation for migratory birds in the Mediterranean region is quite dire, especially in Egypt.
• Some British gulls became disoriented after eating flying ants because the ants contain formic acid.
• A puffin survey in the Farne Islands showed that the breeding population there is recovering from its crash in 2008.
• A new study suggests that homing pigeons navigate with an internal map.
• An eye-tracking study found that peahens watch the width of a peacock's train and how he shakes his feathers but pay less attention to the eyespots during courtship displays. 
• A couple thousand galahs and cockatoos flocked to a town in Queensland because of a drought and caused some blackouts.

Science and nature blogging

• Bruce Byers Consulting: Colorado Fires and Firemoths
• BunyipCo: National Moth Week
• Not Exactly Rocket Science: How Loyalty Paints a Meadow
• Audubon Guides: Species Spotlight: Luna Moth
• 10,000 Birds: The Mousebird Mystery
• Birding Is Fun!: A Rare Bird Comes to New Mexico
• Bird Ecology Study Group: Save MacRitchie Forest: 13. Butterflies, jewels of the forest
• Compound Eye: An interview with Bug Dreams’ Rick Lieder
• Net Results: Update on catbird research
• Anything Larus: Another Lesson in Angle-to-Observer
• Outside My Window: These Are Not Pine Cones
• Tetrapod Zoology: It’s hot and sunny, so birds lie down and sunbathe

Environment and biodiversity

• Honey bees in agricultural settings are exposed to a diverse array of pesticides and fungicides, and bees exposed to high levels of fungicides are more likely to be infected by the parasite Nosema ceranae. Read the study in PLoS ONE.
• Louisiana is suing energy companies for the loss of its coastal wetlands, which were harmed by the building of pipelines and canals.
• A tar sands mining operation in Alberta has been spilling bitumen into wetlands for at least sex weeks, and it is not clear whether the mining company will be able to stop it.
• Alaska is seeing more wildfires due to climate change, and the frequent fires are changing the composition of the boreal forest.
• A DC court found "actual malice" in false accusations against climate scientist Michael Mann, which means that his defamation lawsuit against the National Review and the Competitive Enterprise Institute will proceed.
• Dams are coming down in New England to make way for salmon and other migratory fish. The Veazie Dam on the Penobscot River in Maine was breached this week; the Whittenton Dam in Massachusetts is also being removed, partly for safety reasons.
• In New Jersey, the Nevius Street Dam on the Raritan River near Duke Farms will also be removed to aid fish migration.
• Female Heliconius butterflies have taste sensors in their feet that help them locate the proper host plant to lay eggs.
• Last weekend was the start of Britain's Big Butterfly Count. Observers hope to find Purple Emperors and other rare species.
• The new administrator of the EPA promises to address climate change.
• Western conservationists are using controlled burns to reshape the landscape and prevent catastrophic wildfires.
• Sandy Hook is using goats to clear poison ivy off of a historic structure.
• This Sunday, the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission is holding a Butterfly Day at DeKorte Park.
• New Jersey is currently generating more solar energy per capita than California.

Books and Web Resources on Moths

This week is National Moth Week. Why moths? Moths are extremely diverse, with about 160,000 species worldwide, and appear in a variety of sizes, shapes, and colors. Despite this incredible diversity, many moths are not well studied or are underappreciated; sometimes they are even feared. National Moth Week aims to give more attention to these creatures of the night and to encourage citizen scientists to study and document them.

One obstacle to starting out studying moths as an amateur is that they are not as well covered as birds or even butterflies when it comes to field guides and other references for a popular audience. Moths' diversity makes it difficult for any guide to include all of the possible species, even within a limited area like northeastern North America. Here are some useful books on moths in North America.

The Peterson Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America by David Beadle and Seabrooke Leckie is currently the best field guide for moths in its area. It covers macromoths pretty thoroughly and includes many of the more common micromoths. The photos are of living specimens. I reviewed this book here.

Charles Covell's Field Guide to Moths of Eastern North America has effectively been replaced by the previous guide though it covers a larger area. It uses spread-winged specimens, and some printings have black and white illustrations. The guide has been out of print for a long time, but a reprint is available from the Virginia Museum of Natural History.

Caterpillars of Eastern North America by David Wagner covers common caterpillars of both moths and butterflies. This is a useful starting point for learning about caterpillars.

Owlet Caterpillars of Eastern North America by David Wagner, Dale Schweitzer, J. Bolling Sullivan, Richard Reardon provides thorough coverage of caterpillars from the superfamily Noctuoidea. This is primarily for people who already have a pretty deep interest in moths. I reviewed it here.

Moths & Caterpillars of the North Woods by Jim Sogaard has limited coverage, but I found it useful when I was first learning moths.

Le guide des papillons du Québec – Version scientifique by Louis Handfield is a two-volume French language guide for northeastern North America.

Moths of Western North America by Jerry Powell and Paul Opler covers the western region.

Discovering Moths: Nighttime Jewels in Your Own Backyard by John Himmelman is not a field guide but a popular introduction to moths. It covers how to find and study moths, some aspects of moth biology, interesting lepidopterists, and moths in mythology and popular culture.

Tiger Moths and Woolly Bears: Behavior, Ecology, and Evolution of the Arctiidae, edited by William Conner, is a collection of articles on tiger moth biology.

The Moth Book: A Popular Guide to a Knowledge of the Moths of North America by W.J. Holland is available as a free download from the Biodiversity Heritage Library, which hosts a number of older books on Lepidoptera. It is also available from Google Books. The taxonomy is out of date, but it still may be a useful resource.

Because the books available can only cover so much, web resources are essential for confirming identifications and learning more about moths. Here are a few useful ones.

The Moth Photographers Group is probably the single most useful website for studying North American moths. Its plate series has thousands of high quality images, with multiple images for each species, including micromoths. It also provides links to much more information. Before the publication of Beadle and Leckie's guide, this was my main resource for identifying moths, and even now I still use it regularly.

BugGuide maintains guide pages for insects with reference images and text; users may submit photos for identification. The coverage is more uneven than at the Moth Photographers Group.

Pacific Northwest Moths covers 1,200 species of moths with species accounts and an interactive key for identification.

Butterflies and Moths of North America has species profiles and checklists.

Lepidoptera Barcode of Life is building a DNA barcode library of positively identified moth specimens. Images of moths in their database can be viewed on their website. Mark Dreiling is a major contributor of specimens.

National Moth Week has instructions for finding moths and links to many other resources, including where to submit data for moth observations.

Discover Life has a simple moth protocol for obtaining more useful data.

Finally, for those in my home county, Todd Dreyer has created a collection of beautiful photographs of moths in Middlesex County, New Jersey.

Photo of the Week

This week is National Moth Week. The vast majority of moths fly at night and have special adaptations for a nocturnal lifestyle. They navigate using the stars and moon, find each other with pheromones rather than visual displays, have cryptic patterns for hiding during the day, and can shiver to warm themselves on cooler nights. Some moths even have the ability to hear and jam bat sonar.

However, a select few moths fly during daylight hours. Such moths are often brightly colored and might be mistaken for butterflies, bees, or other insects that we are used to seeing during the day. Among these diurnal moths are the hummingbird sphinx moths in genus Hemaris, family Sphingidae, such as the Snowberry Clearwing pictured above. Like the Hummingbird Clearwing, also in genus Hemaris, its flight is reminiscent of a hummingbird's. Aided by its long proboscis, it feeds on deeply tubular flowers such as the wild bergamot in the photo above. The strongly contrasting yellow and black markings visually suggest those of a bumblebee. When I was photographing this Snowberry Clearwing, I had some trouble keeping track of which yellow-and-black insects were clearwings and which were bumblebees. Snowberry Clearwing moths use snowberry, honeysuckle, and dogbane as larval hosts.

I photographed this Snowberry Clearwing yesterday at Negri-Nepote Grassland Preserve during a Birds and Butterflies walk led by Chris and Paula Williams of NJ Audubon. As of my writing this, thunderstorms are predicted for every night this week, so I am not sure whether I will be able to put out my blacklight.

Loose Feathers #401

Gull-billed tern at Tijuana Slough National Wildlife Refuge / Photo by R. Baak (USFWS)

Birds and birding

• Dead waterbirds are being found around industrial-scale solar energy installations in the California desert. These include ducks, grebes, and rails, as well as songbirds associated with wetland habitats. As the birds migrate over the desert, they may see the sun reflecting off the solar panels or mirrors and mistake them for a body of water. Great Blue Herons are among the casualties.
• The farm bill standoff is holding up funding for the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to maintain habitat for grassland birds.
• Artificial rafts covered in vegetation are rebuilding the breeding population of Black-throated Divers (a.k.a. Arctic Loon) in Scotland.
• Wild chili pepper seeds that pass through the gut of a Small-billed Elaenia are more likely to germinate and grow into plants.
• A team of conservationists has completed its eradication of feral rodents from South Georgia. The goal of the program was to improve the survival rate of the island's breeding birds, included the endemic South Georgia Pipit and South Georgia Pintail.
• The Ground Tit (Parus humilis) can survive in the harsh Tibetan plateau thanks to genetic adaptations for low-oxygen and cold environments.
• This year's survey of Atlantic Puffins in the Farne Islands found that their population is recovering from a recent crash.
• Some polyandrous shorebirds select mates on the basis of physical attributes rather than brain size; this may be because body size evolves faster than brain size in these species.
• A study suggests that bird and mammal brains have similar structures and connections.

Science and nature blogging

• ABA Blog: The evolution of county listing 
• 10,000 Birds: Black-throated Sparrow at Red Rock Canyon National Conservation Area 
• The Net Naturalist: Playful Post – Wildlife Inspired Insults
• Beetles in the Bush: “Rare jewel beetles discovered in Mexico by team of scientists!”
• Bird Ecology Study Group: Save MacRitchie Forest: 13. Butterflies, jewels of the forest

Environment and biodiversity

• National Moth Week starts tomorrow, July 20, and runs through July 28.  Follow the link to find an event near you or learn how to participate yourself. Here is an article on the East Brunswick group that helped get NMW started. Here is another article on the East Brunswick group.
• The Carpenter 1 Fire in Nevada threatens to wipe out the remaining populations of several rare species, including a rare chipmunk and a rare butterfly, the Mount Charleston Blue. (Audio interview with biologists here.)
• A new species of moth was discovered in China. You can read the open-access journal article describing the species (and see more photos of it) here.
• Another new moth species was found in Iran and likewise was published in Zookeys.
• Oregon rewrote its rules on when wolves may be killed by finding a compromise position between conservationists and ranchers.
• In the last ten years, the population of the endangered Iberian Lynx has tripled thanks to conservation efforts.
• A Western Bumblebee (Bombus occidentalis) was spotted in Seattle for the first time since the 1990s.
• Two groups of scientists are trying to restore the American Chestnut as a common tree in eastern forests, one through hybridization and the other through genetic modification.
• Climate change is putting low-lying historic sites at risk.
• Around 300 stingrays turned up dead on a beach in Veracruz, Mexico.
• The US Senate finally confirmed Gina McCarthy to head the EPA. 
• Here is a profile of a South African lepidopterist who searches for (and sometimes finds) rare butterflies.

Photo of the Week

This is the flower of a Swamp Azalea, also known as Clammy Azalea (Rhododendron viscosum). Swamp Azalea is a wetland shrub in the eastern and southern United States. It is notable for its late blooming period. Unlike other azaleas, which bloom in May before they have fully leafed out, Swamp Azalea blooms in late June or July after its leaves are fully grown. The name "clammy" refers to the sticky hairs that line the outside of the tube formed by its petals. I took the photo above in the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge.

Loose Feathers #400

Brown Pelican nest / Photo by Pete McGowan/USFWS

Birds and birding

• A seven-year study of Greater Prairie Chickens found that the birds were less affected by wind turbines than by the availability of native prairie habitat. Still, it is probably best to be cautious about intruding wind (or other energy) developments into important breeding areas for prairie chickens.
• A new study argues that short-lived birds like Great Tits will be able to adjust their breeding cycles to align with earlier availability of food resources in a warming climate. Birds with longer maturation and breeding cycles may not be able to evolve as quickly to meet the challenge.
• The Powdermill Avian Research Center has the longest-running bird banding program in the U.S. In addition to the standard banding process, the center swabs birds to test for West Nile Virus, conducts bioacoustics research, and has a flight tunnel to test how birds see human structures.
• A panel is researching ways to conserve the critically endangered Great Indian Bustard.
• Conservation measures in the UK have spurred a recovery of breeding Ring Ouzels.
• Researchers are developing a vaccine to protect birds from the West Nile Virus.
• A warmer climate makes snakes more active, and those snakes end up eating more birds.

Science and nature blogging

• Bug Girl: Mad Hatterpillar: The Sequel!
• Arthropod Ecology: Help give this jumping spider a common name
• Flickr Blog: Exploring Antelope Canyon
• robertscribbler: Soot From Forest Fires: Yet One More Amplifying Feedback to Human-Caused Climate Change
• WolfeNotes: Tennessee Gas Pipeline Drilling Causes Sinkhole Road Collapse
• Coyote Crossing: The coast redwood is endangered
• mocosoco Birds: Great Swamp Butterflies, July 6, 2013
• Tetrapod Zoology: Historical ornithology 101, a Tet Zoo Guide
• ABA Blog: Meet Matt Daw, the Guy Who Found the New Mexico Rufous-necked Wood-Rail
• 10,000 Birds: Herring Gulls Enjoying a Puddle
• Birding Is Fun!: City Bird Census Proposal
• Outside My Window: Seeing Red
• View from the Cape: Boom time for dragonflies
• Deep Sea News: Missing Energy Found In Warming Deep Oceans

Environment and biodiversity

• Bloggers at the Scientific American Blog Network recommended a list of science books for summer reading. Not many bird-related books are on that list; check out the Birdbooker Report and the Birder's Library for information on the latest birding publications.
• National Moth Week is coming up fairly soon: July 20-28, 2013. De Korte Park in the Meadowlands will hold its second annual moth night on July 22.
• The Bureau of Land Management halted mining claims on public lands designated for large-scale solar projects.
• The neighborhood of Broad Channel in Queens is undergoing a street-raising project to reduce flooding from climate change and future storms.
• An oil train exploded in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, last Saturday and devastated the town. Aside from the damage to buildings, oil leaking from the train may threaten the drinking water supply.
• European cities are experimenting with ways to make green transportation like electric buses run with the help of older transportation infrastructure.
• The National Archives has an exhibit on the EPA's Documerica Project from the 1970s.
• Periodical cicadas did not appear everywhere they were expected this year. They were notably absent in most of South Jersey. BHL has a post about the cicada's reproductive biology.
• Prickly pear, the native eastern cactus, is loaded with pollen.
• Earthquakes around fracking operations are triggered by seismic waves from distant powerful earthquakes. Normally these seismic waves would not be sufficient to cause an earthquake, but the injection of water into bedrock increases pressure at dormant faults.
• Native predators are not sufficient to control the growing population of invasive lionfish in the Atlantic and Caribbean.

Photo of the Week

This is a Blackened Milkweed Beetle (Tetraopes melanurus), a new species for me. Like Red Milkweed Beetle (also a member of genus Tetraopes), it feeds on milkweeds, but it favors butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa) rather than common milkweed (Asclepias syriaca). The bright red color and black heart shape on its elytra is distinctive.

Loose Feathers #399

Bald Eagles nesting at John Heinz NWR / Photo by Bill Buchanan/USFWS

Birds and birding news

•  The Tricolored Blackbird population in California has dropped from 400,000 birds in 2008 to 258,000 in 2011.
• The IUCN released an update to its Red List this week. The total species list is now up to 70,294; 20,934 of those are threatened with extinction, including many long-lived species of trees. In conjunction with the IUCN Red List update, BirdLife released a report on the State of the World's Birds (pdf). About 13% of the world's bird species are threatened.
• Likewise, the US Fish and Wildlife Service released its own State of the Birds report focusing on the role of private land in bird conservation.
• The annual Canada Goose roundup is taking place in Jamaica Bay; this year the National Park Service hopes to kill 500 geese. The geese are being killed to keep them from flying into airplanes landing or taking off at JFK and La Guardia.
• A naturalist found and documented a nocturnal parrot called Pezoporus occidentalis in a remote desert location in Australia. Sightings of this species are very rare, and at times it has been feared extinct.
• A British egg collector stole 50 eggs from a single nesting colony of Least Terns in Crimdon, England.
• British ornithologists have attached geolocators to Common Nightingales to learn more about why the species is in decline. 
• Hummingbirds' wings flex and change shape as they hover.
• Here is how to avoid and survive being attacked by a gull defending its territory.
• A racing pigeon flew from the island of Hokkaido in Japan to Vancouver Island in Canada.

Science and nature blogging

• Not Exactly Rocket Science: Scientist Spills Water, Discovers Self-Cleaning Bird Egg
• Outside My Window: What Do Birds Think Of Fireworks?
• 10,000 Birds: Ringing in the new breeding season with Red Knots
• Compound Eye: The Desert is not "Nowhere"
• PhotoNaturalist: 7 Tips For Photographing Butterflies
• Martin's Moths: A hitchhiker's guide to the moth-ery

Environment and biodiversity

• Radioactive material left over from nuclear bomb testing in the 1940s through 1960s can help to identify poached ivory. 
• The Brood II periodical cicada emergence is winding down.
• According to a recent study, hawkmoths use ultrasound produced from their genitals to jam bats' sonar. 
• The nomination of Gina McCarthy to head the EPA has been held up, but it looks like she will be confirmed. 
• A proposal to allow commercial logging in state forests has created some odd alliances among New Jersey's environmental groups.
• Artists created a very lifelike sculpture of a beached whale in Greenwich, England, to call attention to the city's connection to the sea.
• A new species of long-horned beetle was identified in China.
• A beetle just missed getting squashed by a serve at Wimbledon.
• People held a vigil to mourn the 50,000 bumble bees killed by pesticide in an Oregon parking lot. 
• Personal records of scientific observations can have historical interest; thanks to a math professor who tracked the weather every day, we know exactly what the weather was at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Migration Hazards in the Mediterranean

Cyprus: A whitethroat, en route to winter grounds in Africa, is caught on a lime stick. © David Guttenfelder/National Geographic See more at the link.

Long-distance migrants pose complex problems for conservation. Such birds have far-flung breeding and wintering grounds and use multiple places to rest and refuel during migration. They may cross national, even continental, boundaries. A rapidly disappearing species may face threats at any or all of the places it visits. These threats may not all be of the same variety, and it may not be immediately clear which place poses the greatest hazard. In North America, we are familiar with the plight of the Red Knot, whose population is severely threatened because of two decades of overharvesting horseshoe crabs at migratory stopover points but which also might be affected by climate change on its breeding grounds. Loss of stopover habitat in eastern Asia may also explain the disappearance of most of the world's Spoon-billed Sandpiper population.

It seems that a similar situation has taken hold in the Mediterranean. Many birds breed in Europe and spend the rest of the year in Africa. While passing between those two areas, they must stop at multiple points around the Mediterranean. There danger lurks in the form of nearly unrestricted hunting, as Jonathan Franzen reports in the July issue of National Geographic:

Italian hunters and poachers are the most notorious; for much of the year, the woods and wetlands of rural Italy crackle with gunfire and songbird traps. The food-loving French continue to eat ortolan buntings illegally, and France’s singularly long list of huntable birds includes many struggling species of shorebirds. Songbird trapping is still widespread in parts of Spain; Maltese hunters, frustrated by a lack of native quarry, blast migrating raptors out of the sky; Cypriots harvest warblers on an industrial scale and consume them by the plateful, in defiance of the law.

In the European Union, however, there are at least theoretical constraints on the killing of migratory birds. Public opinion in the EU tends to favor conservation, and a variety of nature-protection groups are helping governments enforce the law. (In Sicily, formerly a hot spot for raptor killing, poaching has been all but eliminated, and some of the former poachers have even become bird-watchers.) Where the situation for migrants is not improving is in the non-EU Mediterranean. In fact, when I visited Albania and Egypt last year, I found that it’s becoming dramatically worse.

This is not simply subsistence hunting. The most sophisticated operations capture hundreds or thousands of birds to sell at market. Captured falcons may retail for tens of thousands of dollars. Some hunt birds as a form of recreation, but without the bag limits that restrain recreational hunting in North America. Bag totals have gone up thanks to technological improvements:

Even as quail are becoming very difficult to find in much of Europe, the take in Egypt is increasing, due to the burgeoning use of playback technology. The best system, Bird Sound, whose digital chip holds high-quality recordings of a hundred different bird sounds, is illegal to use for hunting purposes in the EU but is nevertheless sold in stores with no questions asked. In Alexandria, I spoke with a sport hunter, Wael Karawia, who claimed to have introduced Bird Sound to Egypt in 2009. Karawia said he now feels “very bad, very regretful” about it. Normally, perhaps three-quarters of incoming quail fly over the mist nets, but hunters using Bird Sound can attract the higher flying ones as well; already all the mist netters in north Sinai are doing it, some of them in spring as well as fall. Hunters on Egypt’s large lakes have also begun to use Bird Sound to capture entire flocks of ducks at night.

Both mist nets and bird sound recordings are useful for conservation. Bird banders use mist nets to capture, record, and release birds as a part of long-term population monitoring. Bird recordings help birders and ornithologists learn to identify bird sounds, and playback can be used for scientific surveys, particularly of nocturnal species. Like other tools, though, they can be used for good or ill, and in this article we see their darker side.

Hunting around the Mediterranean is not the only threat to these birds. On their European breeding grounds, they face habitat degradation and pressure from poachers and egg collectors. Climate change may disrupt food availability. As Franzen's report shows, the solutions for protecting long-distance migrants will not be simple or easy.

Read the full article.

Photo of the Week

In late spring and early summer, it is common to see insect nymphs crawling around on plants. As hard as adult insects are to identify, nymphs pose an additional challenge since many of the distinctive markings and structures have not developed yet. The easiest way to tell if an insect is a nymph is to look for the wings. If the wings are missing or stubby and the adult form of that family or order usually has wings, then the insect is probably a nymph. (This does not always work, of course.) The insect above is a nymph Wheel Bug (Arilus cristatus), a type of assassin bug. In its adult form, a Wheel Bug has a gear-like hump above its thorax, which gives the species its common name. At this stage, that feature has not developed yet. One clue to its identity is the stout beak, which it uses to kill and eat other insects.