Green Ladybugs - Spotted Cucumber Beetles

Video: Green Ladybugs - Spotted Cucumber Beetles

"Green Ladybugs" honey bees and butterflies feast on thistle nectar high in the Great Smoky Mountains. These pretty green ladybugs, are not really ladybugs at all, but Spotted Cucumber Beetles! They are native and non-invasive and normally live quiet lives in the forests and meadows doing little damage, but when they invade backyard gardens and farms they become a serious agricultural pest. There really are no greenish ladybugs - ladybugs are more "rounded" and have very short antennae compared to the cucumber beetles.

Those Aren’t Green Ladybugs!

If you find little chartreuse-colored beetles that look like ladybugs

scurrying around your vegetable garden or in among your roses, they’re

not your friends! Most likely they’re western spotted cucumber beetles,

Diabrotica undecimpunctata.

Cucumber beetles are very common pests in vegetable gardens and may

also attack ripening stone fruit. The western spotted cucumber beetle is

greenish-yellow and has twelve black spots on its back. Sometimes confused with predaceous lady

beetles, they can be distinguished by the antennae - lady beetle antennae are short and stubby; while those of cucumber beetles are long and threadlike. Adult beetles are shiny with black heads; larvae are whitish and slender with three pairs of short legs; the head and tip of the abdomen are darker.

Adults feed on the leaves of many vegetables as well as on soft fruit,

shoots and blossoms. They may also spread cucumber mosaic virus or

wilts in cucurbits. Larvae feed exclusively on roots, but do not generally

damage garden plants, although corn may occasionally be damaged.

Management of cucumber beetles is difficult. Most older plants can

support substantial numbers without serious damage. The best strategy

for most vegetable gardens may be to place protective cloth over

emerging plants and remove it when plants are old enough to tolerate damage. On stone-fruit trees, early harvest may be the only option. Various general predators are known to attack cucumber beetles. http://ucanr.edu/sites/MarinMG/files/147777.pdf

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Video: Green Ladybugs - Spotted Cucumber Beetles

Aeroplankton - Plankton In The Sky!

Video: Aeroplankton -  Plankton In The Sky!

Look Up! The air above us is alive with billions of tiny organisms called "aeroplankton" just like the plankton in the oceans.  Hundreds of feet above the forested valley floor the nearly horizontal rays of the setting sun briefly illuminate this amazing atmospheric soup for just a few minutes. Some of this soup consists of tiny insects and spiders that bats and birds eat. It is always there carried on the air currents, but is rarely seen except under unique circumstances such as this. 

Aeroplankton (or aerial plankton) are tiny lifeforms that float and drift in the air, carried by the current of the wind; they are the atmospheric analogue to oceanic plankton.

Most of the living things that make up aeroplankton are very small to microscopic in size, and many can be difficult to identify because of their tiny size. Scientists can collect them for study in traps and sweep nets from aircraft, kites or balloons.

The aeroplankton comprises numerous microbes, including viruses, about 1000 different species of bacteria, around 40,000 varieties of fungi, and hundreds of species of protists, algae, mosses and liverworts that live some part of their life cycle as aeroplankton, often as spores, pollen, and wind-scattered seeds.

A large number of small animals, mainly arthropods (such as insects and spiders), are also carried upwards into the atmosphere by air currents and may be found floating several thousand feet up. Aphids, for example, are frequently found at high altitudes.

Many species of spiders deliberately use the wind to propel themselves. The spider will find a vantage point (such as a branch, fence or surface) and, pointing its abdomen upward, eject fine threads of silk from its spinnerets. At some point, the force exerted by moving air upon the silk threads is great enough to launch the spider into the air. This is called ballooning. Such ballooning spiders (e.g. Linyphiidae) are capable of drifting many miles away from where they started. The flexibility of their silk draglines can aid the aerodynamics of their flight, causing the spiders to drift an unpredictable and sometimes long distance.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroplankton

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Video: Aeroplankton -  Plankton In The Sky!

House Wren Song

Video: House Wren Song

Male House Wren has claimed a nest box and has a mate and spends much of the day loudly singing his upbeat gibberish song for all Backyard birds to hear. These are delightful little birds to have around as they constantly scold anyone who enters "their territory" while mating and raising their young. Often producing two broods a season these little birds eat a prodigious amount of insects and spiders. 

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Video: House Wren Song

Loudest Woodpecker Drumming - Mini Documentary

Video: Loudest Woodpecker Drumming -  Mini Documentary

World's Loudest Woodpecker Drumming and Pecking! Northern Flickers use real man-made steel drums - metal chimney caps - that makes them intelligent "tool-users" and likely among the loudest woodpecker drummers in the world. But loud doesn't begin to describe what the 15-minute long drumming and calling sessions sound like  inside the house whose chimney top is used as a drum. Enjoy this short documentary and imagine what this sounds like at the break of dawn as a male Northern Flicker defends his territory, mate and nest box!

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Video: Loudest Woodpecker Drumming -  Mini Documentary

Black and White Warbler

Video: Black and White Warbler

The elusive Black and White Warbler -  a first time capture for me! Much like a nuthatch, the Black and White Warbler works rapidly up and down the bark of trees exclusively for its meals. Although the video is short and quality less than normal due to rapid motion of the warbler it does show its characteristic feeding behavior and its feet adapted just like a nuthatch for spending time on the trees. This is a bird in a hurry finding as many small bugs on the bark and branches of trees as it can in a short amount of time.

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Video: Black and White Warbler

Large Carpenter Bee Sounds - Close Up

Video: Large Carpenter Bee Sounds - Close Up

A Large loud female Carpenter Bee is looking for a place to start a nest in wood. They generally avoid treated deck lumber as in this case, but they spend considerable amount of time looking. She does a nice little dance in the process. Only the female can sting, but generally they are very "friendly" bees and tolerate me taking video just a few inches away and often hover near people with no ill will intended, just curious. The problem is they make nests by tunneling into wood, however I have never had them do any damage to houses etc. as their numbers appear small. Often people trap and kill them, but another option is to make or buy houses for them and see if they will adopt them, they are after all native bees and are by nature excellent pollinators.

In America north of Mexico, the subfamily Xylocopinae is composed of two genera, Ceratina (small carpenter bees) and Xylocopa (large carpenter bees). These bees get their common name from their nesting habits: small carpenter bees excavate tunnels in pithy stems of various bushes; large carpenter bees chew nesting galleries in solid wood or in stumps, logs, or dead branches of trees (Hurd and Moure 1963). The large carpenter bees may become economic pests if nesting takes place in structural timbers, fence posts, wooden water tanks, or the like.

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Video: Large Carpenter Bee Sounds - Close Up