Gosh, been a little busy as of late, so haven’t had the chance for an update. I am anxiously awaiting spring’s arrival, but unfortunately mother nature hates me and dumped 5 inches of snow on us last night. UGH! The deer are getting a little anxious about this too, I think. Food for them has been scarce since its been buried by the darn white stuff.

Migrating birds started coming back. A ton of red tail have made their way through…

..and the Common Grackles have been ravaging my bird feeder. Although a lot of people tend not to like grackles, I actually have a fondness for them that I can’t really explain.

And lastly, I found a nice little silverfish (Thysanura) that let me take its photo.

Silverfish are a wingless insect that get their name from the scale-like appearance on their body. They are one of the most primitive insect orders that date back some 300 million years.

I can’t tell you how excited I am for spring migration to really start. This little guy showed up in my backyard this past week.

There is one thing that drives me crazy when it comes to my plants and thats finding stupid scale insects on them. I found the little buggers on one of my ferns today

As an entomologist, and one with a nice new camera, scale insects aren’t that bad because for one, they don’t move on you when trying to take a photo, and for two, they are actually kind of cool.

They secrete a wax coat for defense. Females don’t have wings and actually keep a lot of their juvenile external morphology (the fancy word for this is neoteny). Males do have wings, but only one pair, which is more like the Diptera (true flies). And males only live for about a day or so, only living long enough to mate.

…now if only I could tell if she thought it was good or not.

What a difference a real macro lens can make! A year ago I photographed snow fleas. My former graduate adviser recently asked me for some good snow flea photos and now that I have my fancy Nikon and lenses I decided to take the challenge.

They are a dark blue color, and the flash really makes a difference in the color projected in the photos. They are a tiny springtail (1-2mm) that can often be found in the snow. They have an organ called a furcula that “springs” or catapults them in the air…which obviously adds some difficulty in trying to get close to them for a photograph. You can really see the furcula well in the second photo, its the structure sticking up near the posterior end.

For more information on snow fleas see this wikipedia page.