The barn swallow nest on our front porch that provided some video footage last summer is once again occupied. However, I haven’t noticed the presence of baby birds, and my curiosity got the better of me this afternoon. I mounted my GoPro on an extendable monopod, connected it via wifi to my iPad so I could monitor the footage, and did some detective work. Here’s what I found:
I’ve never seen this before. Is it unusual for baby birds to share a nest with unhatched – but viable – eggs? I hate to be pessimistic, but I’m afraid two two eggs are not going to hatch…seems like they should have by now. I’ll let you know if and when anything changes.
While I was out, I noticed an interesting insect crawling on the lone black-eyed susan bloom, so I swapped the GoPro for my macro-lensed DSLR.
I couldn’t i.d. the insect. It flew away, and the presence of wings under the carapace seems to indicate that it’s a beetle of some kind (we’ve touched on the bug-vs-beetle distinction in these pages), but I couldn’t find anything close to a matching photo despite extensive research (which, for me, means 3 1/2 minutes looking at Googled images). If you have an idea, feel free to share it. Anyway, from a distance it wasn’t too impressive, but up close, the sparkling carapace and delicate hairs glistening in the sunlight were a revelation.
Ever the librarian… I would guess something along these lines: http://bugguide.net/node/view/2946 :).
Rachel, the coloring of the main shell is similar, but the legs and antennae don’t really match. And then there’s that greenish-gold “cowl”…I can’t find anything that looks like that, so far.
Well after lots more research including a site which claimed to have 261 bugs from Texas… I’m afraid I have no clue (I hate giving up hehe). I have learnt about lots of things that I’m glad I knew nothing about when I visited last though hehe.
Yeah, sometimes ignorance really is bliss. (We found a not-quite-dead scorpion on our kitchen floor this morning!)