kcurtain

Cool shot - love the eyes! Looks like it's eating a caddisfly of some sort.

It looks to be a beetle in Family Cerambycidae (longhorn beetles). Unfortunately, there are tons of black longhorn beetles, so it would be difficult to narrow down a species...

Hi Ashley, we only have Cope's Gray Treefrogs at Huntley Meadows. But they have literally just begun breeding this year - the first eggs were found last week - so I didn't think that this could be a young Cope's. Also, recent green treefrog metamorphs may lack a distinctive white stripe and yellow flecks (not even all adult green treefrogs have yellow flecks), so that's not particularly diagnostic. I didn't really pay attention to the legs though - which are diagnostic in metamorphs and are striped in the Cope's gray/gray and not in the green. So I will be changing the spotting based on that. Maybe some eggs were laid during the unexpected warm patch we had earlier this year when both species began calling earlier than has previously been recorded.

I agree with Ashley that it's probably an alder flycatcher from the looks of it. Did you hear the bird sing? They can generally only be distinguished from similar species by song. You can listen to the song and compare it to similar species here: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Alder...

Beautiful snake! I love the patterns on young rat snakes, though we only have the black ones up here - jealous of your yellow!

Thank you Treichard! It does indeed seem to be in that genus, though it looks like identifying it to species is impossible. I will update the spotting.

Spectacular!

Hi drP,
I hadn't seen the paper you were referring to, but I've just looked it up - fascinating stuff! Thanks for drawing my attention to it. :-)

Awesome shot!

Unless the location is wrong on the map, then this is definitely an eastern, not a western, tiger swallowtail. They look almost identical, but the western's range does not extend anywhere near Maryland.