At first glance they look like a collection of the same, very small dark insects with a red to brown head, orange thorax and an abdomen of white lines on black. But after further inspection, there are two distinct types of insect on the fence posts near Mount Pisgah’s main entrance.
Read more →The rain-saturated reefs of mosses and lichens growing throughout the arboretum soften my eyes and quiet my mind. The Ruby-crowned Kinglet scribbles a path through the canopy.
Read more →What super-cool insect has some of the traits of a walking stick, a praying mantis, and a water strider but is none of those things? It’s this week’s star: The thread-legged bug.
Read more →The cottonwood leaves are golden.
They shimmer against an infinite blue
like reflections of the sun’s rays across
the surface of the river.
Most of the creatures described in this column are from insect orders like Diptera (flies) or Coleoptera (beetles) that have hundreds of thousands of species. This week’s subject is from a smaller order with around 11,000 species. It’s the bark louse.
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