On Friday night we did a moth night for the Natural Areas Preservation people and volunteers at Oakwoods Nature Area. What a great evening at a place we had never been to.
The meandering trails in the woods skirt a nice vernal pool and a large pond/lake. Setting up was simple and at about 9:30 PM EDT the volunteers started showing up.
Somehow while managing our “lighthouse” (an interesting moth set up) I forgot to get back down to the sheet where Susan was talking to people about how the night would go. We ended up taking everything down around midnight. But the 40+ volunteers seemed to have a good time. Now, on to some of what we found –
Skiff moth on the left, Lecontes haploa on the right.
A looper that might be a Two-spotted looper.
Hollow-spotted Blepharomastix moth, then name is much longer that the size of the moth.
This Basswood leafroller moth is a stunner.
An insect that drew a lot of attention is this Gallinipper, a rather large mosquito.
An d finally, a forked fungus beetle – a beetle that I have not seen since the 1990s and was perhaps my favorite sighting of the evening.
More later…
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