Pleasure Beach Training
The Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History and Audubon Connecticut teamed up to instruct and ready our new WildLife Guards Crew Leaders, Alivia Sheffield and Emily Allen, from June 22 through June 26 in preparation for our WildLife Guards (WLG) program, which trains, mentors, and employs ten local high schools students. This is RTPI’s first year participating in the very successful education and outreach program. Teaching the teachers is a very important task, especially when they and their students will be reaching tens of thousands of people this summer! The students and...
Read MoreFamiliar Bluets
Here we have a pair of Familiar Bluet (Enallagma civile) damselflies in a “wheel”, a male and female joined together for mating. They are perched at a pond in this case but they can also fly this way. The male will likely remain with her until she lays the eggs. We are about to enter the prime flight time for our odonata – get out there to any local bodies of water to see what you can find. We will continue to survey for them across the Northeast to gain a greater knowledge of their distribution and abundance plus the health of our waterways.
Read MorePiping Plover Hatchlings & WildLife Guards
A Piping Plover pair at Bridgeport, Connecticut’s Pleasure Beach became new parents to four tiny hatchlings either very late on the night of Thursday, June 18 or early in the morning of Friday, June 19. Our work in the Audubon Alliance for Coastal Waterbirds makes them our responsibility. These birds are the City’s one pair for the 2015 season, and with Pleasure Beach being open to the public for a second year after being off limits for nearly 20 years and overrun with predators. I visited them with Audubon Connecticut’s Important Bird Area Program Coordinator Corrie...
Read MoreTowering Osprey
Can you identify this photo’s distant subject? That Osprey and its mate have built a nest in what looks like an optical illusion or mind maze, but in reality is a massive radio tower. It is a wonderful thing that the species’ comeback has been so successful in the last several decades that they are now relegated to using any bare structure they can find. I certainly would worry about it up there during a thunderstorm, for a few reasons, but having an abundant breeding population is one of those good problems. Even if these individual birds are not successful this season you can...
Read MoreHorseshoe Crabs
If you are on the Atlantic Coast during the late spring you may be fortunate enough to find Horseshoe Crabs during the breeding season. Early June, especially around a new or full moon, is a very busy time for these marine arthropods that are considering living fossils, having existed nearly unchanged for approximately 450 million years. These photos were taken at Stratford Point in Stratford, Connecticut, an important mating site at the mouth of the Housatonic River. The females will lay eggs on beaches like this one, some subsequently being eaten by migrant shorebirds. The most vivid...
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