Nature's Notebook

This past week I took my “naturalizing†down a notch. In size, that is.  Inspired by the incomparable Ted Gilman — an Audubon naturalist and educator based in Greenwich who has been teaching for more than 30 years, and who gave several workshops at the recent Sharon Audubon Festival — I pulled my trusty magnifying lens out of my drawer and started looking closely at goldenrods and other flowers.  What you find is a whole miniature ecosystem inhabited by insects of many and varied kinds.

 I was especially interested in trying to find an ambush bug (like the one illustrated here) after Ted had shown us one at the festival. These fascinating, predatory insects, members of the order of “true bugs†(Heteroptera), hide on the undersides of flowers — yellow ones are favored — where they generally take the color of the flower as camouflage. When a bee approaches, the bug darts out and grasps it with its front legs, and then injects its tubelike mouth into it (Ted called it a “juice box strawâ€) and literally sucks the life out of it.

As I turned over the goldenrods growing in my backyard, I didn’t find an ambush bug, but I did find some other kind of true bug, which, amusingly, kept running around to the underside of the plant each time I turned it over. There were tiny ladybug-like insects tucked into the tiny flowers, and an unidentified member of the Hymenoptera order (the bees, wasps, and their kin).

 I should add that insect identification is nothing like bird identification, and just to be able to narrow a bug down to an order or family is a challenge. And I’m a lot better at bird identification!

 This is an exploration you can try on your own, whether in your garden or in a field of wildflowers, but you should take note of a couple of cautions: First, be careful of bees and keep a respectful distance. Naturally, bees are among the most abundant of flower visitors, but they are generally non-aggressive unless approached too closely.  Second, always check for ticks.

Fred Baumgarten is a naturalist and writer. He can be reached at fredb58@sbcglobal.net. His blog is at thatbirdblog.blogspot.com.