Week 29 - Green-Wood Cemetery

Below are the highlights for week 29, July 15th through July 21st, in Green-Wood Cemetery. It was another week with some fairly miserable weather, so I didn't get out as much as I would have liked.

Beginning with the birds, there was suddenly a lot of very visible juvenile Gray Catbirds out exploring. I also just started noticing several juvenile Chipping Sparrows. The Chipping Sparrows are frequently parasitized by Brown-headed Cowbirds and I'll often see the adult sparrows feeding them around this time of year. I haven't observed any this year, but it just might be that I've spent less time looking due to the weather.

Juvenile Gray Catbird

Juvenile Chipping Sparrow with adult

Our juvenile Red-tailed Hawk is still learning how to navigate the cemetery and relying on food from its parents. I'll frequently hear its squealing calls around "The Flats" when it gets hungry. I saw one of the adults perched in a huge oak tree with a freshly killed squirrel. It was making piercing whistled chirps, calling the young one in for breakfast. I never saw the juvenile fly in for the meal, but did hear many songbird alert calls in the distance, so figured it was not far away.

Juvenile Red-tailed Hawk

Adult with fresh kill for juvenile

Some southbound migrants observed this week were Solitary Sandpiper, Baltimore Oriole, Orchard Oriole, Louisiana Waterthrush, American Redstart, Northern Parula and Yellow Warbler.

Solitary Sandpiper

Baltimore Orioles

American Redstart

Most of the early blooming milkweed plants have gone to seed, however, one subtly fragrant species, the Swamp Milkweed is now adorning the cemetery with its pink flowers.

Swamp Milkweed

Butterfly numbers increased slightly last week with more Black Swallowtails, Eastern Tiger Swallowtails and Summer Azures fluttering about the cemetery. In addition, I saw my first Banded Hairstreak of the year during my Sunday morning walk.

Black Swallowtail

Banded Hairstreak

A couple of the fruiting trees I noticed last week were Horsechestnut and Chinese Arborvitae (a type of cypress). Also, Nodding Onion is now flowering amongst the beds of Mountain Mint.

Horsechestnut

Chinese Arborvitae (Platycladus orientalis)

Nodding Onion

With the Dog Days of Summer come the churring songs of the cicadas. Over the past week the number of cicadas singing from the cemetery treetops has noticably increased. It should be of no surprise that the annual Cicada Killer Wasp colonies have also multiplied. There are several areas around Green-Wood with short grass and sandy soil that are preferred by these frightening looking but docile insects. This wasp paralyzes its prey, transports it to a subterranean burrow, where it then deposits its eggs for consuming by the growing offspring. Despite this gruesome strategy, the adult Cicada Killers are nectar eaters.

Cicada Killer Wasp

Here are a few other abundant pollinators observed frequently last week.

Leaf-cutter Bee

White-Striped Black Mason Wasp

Great Black Wasp

I've observed around 18 species of dragonfly and damselfly in Green-Wood Cemetery. Many of those are migrating through the area with probably less than half of them breeding here. Like the birds, the diversity of odonates seems to be increasing now with the arrival of the migrating species.

Twelve-spotted Skimmer

Common Green Darner ovipositing

Finally, one insect that nobody is happy to see now is the Spotted Lanternfly. Some of the trees and shrubs have been blanketed with the tiny black and red nymphs, but now those young lanternflies are emerging into their adult form. One positive note is that I witnessed an immature Black-billed Cuckoo eating many of the nymphs. Now we just need to train all the other birds to eat them.

Freshly emerged Spotted Lanternfly