Saturday, August 12, join me at Wave Hill in the Bronx. I’ll be leading two Native Pollinator Walks, part of their Bees, Butterflies, and Blooms weekend of events. My walks will step off at 11am and 1pm from the Perkins Visitor Center, where the gift shop is located.
I’ll be staffing their Pollination Station information table between walks.
For a list of all that weekend’s events, Saturday and Sunday, August 12th & 13th, see:
https://www.wavehill.org/calendar/bees-butterflies-blooms-weekend
The Xerces Society, in collaboration with the IUCN SSC Firefly Specialist Group and New Mexico BioPark Society, has launched the Firefly Atlas project:
Continue readingThe Firefly Atlas is a collaborative effort to better understand and conserve the diversity of fireflies in North America. Launched in 2022, the project aims to advance our collective understanding of firefly species’ distributions, phenology, and habitat associations, as well as to identify threats to their populations.
Although the Atlas tracks all species described from the US and Canada, we are currently prioritizing efforts for a subset of 13 threatened and data deficient species found in three focal regions of the US: the Mid-Atlantic, Southeast, and Southwest. These priority regions were chosen based upon having a high number of threatened species and/or a high number of data deficient species. – What is the Firefly Atlas?
Observing the diversity of life that coexists in one place is one of the rewards of visiting the same natural area over a long period of time. My garden not only offers myself and passersby such an observatory. It’s also a laboratory in which I can research how insects engage with their environment – both biotic and abiotic – and imagine, design, and create habitat to better provide for their needs.
I use iNaturalist to document the diversity of life in my garden. Although I only posted my first iNaturalist Observation in 2017, my garden Observations now span more than a decade. As of this year, I’ve documented over 400 insect species making use of my garden.
This biodiversity, and my documentation of it, is intentional. And although all of this is by design, all I can do is uncover the latent urban biodiversity in and around my garden. Each new species I find is a surprise to me.
As I explained in last year’s Home of the Wild, native plants have been a significant focus of my gardening since we bought our home and I started the current garden in 2005. I’m always researching and experimenting with new species. And, like any avid gardener, I’m always killing things off, too.
I do my best to track my acquisitions, and failed plantings, in a spreadsheet. I categorize the species by whether they are native to the five counties of New York City, native to the NYC region – e.g.: within two counties – or are some other species native to eastern North America.
This chart summarizes the increase in native plant diversity in my garden over the years. Stacked columns, plotted against the left axis, show the number of species I acquired each year: blue for NYC-native, red for NYC-regional, and green for eastern U.S. native plant species. The large undated bar on the left represents plants I brought with me from prior gardens, or for which I’ve lost track of when or how I got them. The lines, ploted against the right axis, show the total number of species: blue for NYC-native plant species, and green for everything else.
2014 stands out as an exceptional year for plant acquisitions. That was my first year visiting the Native Plants in the Landscape Conference in Millserville, Pennsylvania. It has an enormous accompanying native plant sale with vendors from all over the mid-Atlantic, of which I took full advantage.
I maintain a Wish List of plants I want to try to grow in my garden. (Anyone know of a NYC-regional source for dwarf prairie willow, Salix occidentalis?!) The past few years I have targeted species for their ecological value in my garden:
As of this year, I’m growing nearly 300 species of native plants, over 200 of which are native to New York City. With that increase in plant diversity, there’s been an increase in insect diversity (though habitat needs more than having the right plants).
Most of the insects that have visited my garden over the past decade fall into one of six groups:
That’s where things stand today. But this didn’t happen all at once. This chart shows how I’ve accumulated species records in my garden for each of these groups over time. We can see that the slope of the lines increased sharply over the past three years, from 2019 through 2021.
It’s a little easier to see which taxa contributed most to the increases if we look instead at just the new species, instead of the total number of species. This stacked column chart shows the number of new species I’ve found each year in my garden, for each of my six focus taxa. Again, the last three years stand out as being responsible for most of the increase.
The color codes of the stacked column segments are the same as the lines in the previous chart to make it easier to draw comparisons between the two:
I believe that at least some of these increases reflect success in creating habitat for diverse insect species. But my observing behaviors have not been consistent over the years. Am I seeing more species just because I’m spending more time looking for them? And — if so — how much observation do I need to do to be confident I’m adequately sampling my garden?
I ramped up my Observations the past two years – 2020 & 2021 – to increase my contributions to two iNaturalist Projects:
As mentioned above, I wrote about the first Project, and the history of my garden as insect habitat on my blog last year. ESNPS was originally scheduled to run only three years, from 2018 through 2020. Of course, the pandemic changed those plans; they decided to extend the iNaturalist portion another year, into 2021.
By concentrating on these two efforts, I increased my Observations in my own garden by a factor of 8. This year, I also invested in better macro equipment. So I was spending a lot more time in my garden, and was able to capture many more individuals with photographs good enough for identification.
The Empire State Native Pollinator Survey includes bees and Syrphidae, flower and hover flies, among its focal taxa. Although my increased observation found more of everything, bees and flies took up a greater proportion of the total observations.
How many observations do I need to make to have high confidence I have found most of the species present in my garden? This chart compares the number of species observed against the number of observations for the four most diverse taxa: flies, wasps, bees, and beetles. I’ve added labels for the two most recent years, to highlight that not only did they have the most observations, they are also the years I found the most species.
Last year was not a pace of observation I can sustain indefinitely. There’s a lot of effort in taking high-quality, identifiable macro photographs of insects in the garden to uploading them as verifiable observatinos in iNaturalist. Some days it took most of my waking hours, spread over multiple days, just to process all the photographs from a single day of observation.
My iNaturalist activity the past year was artificial, driven by the gamification offered by the two Projects in which I was actively “competing”. But this past year gave me a strong foundation for continuing to make effective observations. I look forward to being surprised by future discoveries in my garden.
Hot Sheets Habitat, 2021-11-19
Documenting Insect-Plant Interactions, 2021-10-29
Home of the Wild, 2020-05-13
My garden is also registered as a butterfly and monarch habitat, and monarch waystation. It proved its worth this year. I observed multiple couplings, in addition to the usual egg-laying. 
iNaturalist: Insects mating in my garden during 2021
Over the weekend I was inspired to write a little tweet storm. I thought it would make a good blog post.
It started with a blog post by entomologist Eric Eaton, who goes by @BugEric on his blog, Twitter and other social media. Benjamin Vogt, a native plants evangelist (my word, bestowed with respect) tweeted a link, which is how it came to my attention.
The Monarch is the Giant Panda of invertebrates. It has a lobby built of organizations that stand to lose money unless they can manufacture repeated crises. Well-intentioned as they are, they are siphoning funding away from efforts to conserve other invertebrate species that are at far greater risk. The Monarch is not going extinct.
– Bug Eric: Stop Saying the Monarch is a “Gateway Species” for an Appreciation of Other Insects
I grow milkweed in my garden – at least 3 different species. (I’m waiting to see if the other 3 species persist and return.) I’ve documented monarch butterflies visiting the past 2 years. Last year I got eggs, and caterpillars.
But monarchs aren’t the only visitors to my milkweeds.
A popular argument for making the Monarch an invertebrate icon is that “being such an icon has really helped us reach the average person about habitat and native plants and conservation, and by extension, the environment and climate change,” as one friend on social media put it. Well, if only that were true. If people who care about the Monarch had any understanding of ecology at all, they would not be complaining that “there are beetles eating the milkweed I planted for Monarchs!” They would not be devastated because one wasp killed one of the caterpillars.
As Eric noted in his article, gardeners who fret over “what’s eating my milkweed” are valuing their monarchs over the other invertebrates. Like these aphids.
Like the monarchs, their bright orange color is aposematic, warning potential predators of their milkweed-borrowed toxicity. No matter … They sustain other visitors, like this brown lacewing larva.
Or this Ocyptamus fuscipennis, syrphid/flower fly, showing great interest in the aphids on Asclepias incarnata, swamp milkweed, in my front yard.
And who knows what this Hymenoptera was hunting for.
And there are other floral visitors besides the charismatic butterflies.
There are many more I’ve yet to identify. All this on just three species of plants in my garden. Plants that some would grow only for the monarchs.
I’m growing over 200 species of plants native to New York City, and another 80 or so regional natives.
With all that botanical diversity has come insect diversity:
And, oh yeah, 24 species of butterflies, moths, and skippers. Including the charismatic monarchs.
| Family | Common Name | # Species |
| Coleoptera | Beetles | 20 |
| Diptera | Flies | 23 |
| Hemiptera | Bugs | 9 |
| Hymenoptera | Bees | 31 |
| Hymenoptera | Wasps | 28 |
| Lepidoptera | Butterflies, Moths, and Skippers | 24 |
Let’s plant milkweed, just not only for the monarchs.
And not just milkweeds.
Oh, and no pesticides.
Thank you.
Danaus plexippus, monarch butterfly
Milkweed species I’m growing in my garden. (Not all the photos are taken from my garden.)
Bug Eric: Stop Saying the Monarch is a “Gateway Species” for an Appreciation of Other Insects
New York State Gardeners: You can help re-introduce our state insect! See Links below.
A decade ago, shortly after I launched this blog, I wrote the following:
[Coccinella] novemnotata was once common. How did New York State get to have a once-native-but-no-longer-resident state insect?
Not just common; C. novemnotata, or C9 for short, was once the most common lady beetle in the eastern U.S.
In 1980, when the bill was first introduced to make C9 our state insect, it was still common. It suffered a rapid decline through the 1980s. By the time it was finally designated the state insect in 1989, it hadn’t been seen in the state for 7 years.
In 2006, then-assemblywoman Nancy Calhoun introduced a bill to change the state insect to one which hadn’t been extirpated from the state. In her words, “Why do we want to get something like this wrong?” I wrote:
Instead of introducing a bill to gloss over the extirpation of a species, let’s reintroduce and restore C. novemnotata to New York State. Then our state insect would be a symbol to aspire to, and not simply an “error.”
Well, it may finally be time to do so. In 2001, 29 years after its disappearance from the state, C9 was finally found again, on Long Island. After years of research, Dr. John Losey and his colleagues at Cornell University have successfully reared C9 in captivity. And now, through the Lost Ladybug Project, they are making C9 larvae available to New York state gardeners and others.
Here’s one of them, freshly released in my garden, exploring Heliopsis helianthoides in my front yard.
1970: Coccinella novemnotata (C9) is the most common lady beetle species in the northeastern U.S.
1980: Nominated as New York state insect.
1980s: Begins rapidly declining. Speculation as to causes includes competition with introduced species, but no definitive answers have yet been found.
1982: Last seen in New York state.
1989: Designated NY State Insect, despite being apparently absent for 7 years.
1992: Last seen in the eastern U.S.
2000: The Lost Ladybug Project initiated as a citizen science project.
2006-06-15: Bill 2005-A06247 passes the NY State Assembly to change the state insect from Coccinella novemnotata, extirpated from NY State, to Coleomegilla maculata.
October 2006: C9 re-discovered in Virginia, first time it’s seen on the East Coast since 1992, 14 years.
2011-07-30: C9 rediscovered on Long Island, first time seen in New York since 1982, 29 years.
2016: Lost Ladybug Project launches program to re-introduce captively bred C9
Coleomegilla usurps Coccinella as New York State Insect, 2006-06-23
Flickr photo set: Coccinella novemnotata, nine-spotted lady beetle, aka “C9”
Pollinator Gardens, for Schools and Others, 2015-02-20
FAQ: Where do you get your plants?
The 2014 NYCWW Pollinator Safari of my Gardens
Gardening with the Hymenoptera (and yet not), 2011-07-31
Gardening with the Lepidoptera, 2011-06-11
My blog posts on Butterflies (Lepidoptera), Bees and Wasps (Hymenoptera), Pollinators, Habitat, and Ecology
My Native Plants page
Retail sources for native plants
Ninespotted Ladybug Restoration
C. novemnotata in decline
NY State Assemble Bill 2005-A06247
BugGuide: Coccinella novemnotata
Discover Life: Coccinella novemnotata Herbst, 1793:269, NINE-SPOTTED LADY BEETLE, Nine-spotted ladybug
Encyclopedia of Life (EOL): Coccinella novemnotata
Xerces Society:
Animal Diversity: Coccinella novemnotata
Cornell University, Insect Conservation: Coccinella novemnotata, Nine Spotted lady Beetle
Sunday, while cutting up edited plants into my compost tumbler, I caught sight of something unusual out of the corner of my eye. It turned out to be Bombus fervidus, golden northern bumblebee, or simply, the yellow bumblebee.
This is at least the 21st bee species I’ve found in my garden. And this brings to 20, or more, the number of new insect species I’ve identified in my garden this year alone.
Flickr photo set
All my bee photo albums
BugGuide: Bombus fervidus, Golden Northern Bumble Bee
Discover Life: Bombus fervidus
Encyclopedia of Life: Bombus fervidus
2015-09-19: Added Homeosoma, observed 10 days ago and just identified, bringing the total to 23.
2015-09-13: Two more Hymenoptera species identified from the last weekend in August: Bombus fervidus, golden northern bumblebee, and Gnamptopelta osidianator, an Ichneumon wasp. And a new Diptera species identified today: Hermetia illucens. That brings the number of species to 22.
2015-07-12: Added two I’d forgotten about: Orius insidiosus, and Anthrenus verbasci. That brings the number of species to 19.
These are the insect species I’ve discovered or identified in my garden for the first time this year.
Anthrenus verbasci, varied carpet beetle, and Orius insidiosus, insidous flower bug, on Erigeron, fleabane.
To be provided …
Pyrrhalta viburni, the viburnum leaf beetle, or VLB for short, is native to Europe. It was first discovered in North America barely two decades ago, in Maine in 1994. Both larvae and adults eat leaves. Our native Viburnum species are extremely vulnerable; they aren’t adapted to this species of leaf beetle. With ample food supply, and no native predators to control its spread, VLB has rapidly expanded its range since.
The viburnum leaf beetle, Pyrrhalta viburni (Paykull), is an invasive, non-native beetle that first appeared in New York along Lake Ontario in 1996, and has steadily spread across the state and down the Hudson Valley. It is a voracious eater that can defoliate viburnum shrubs entirely. Plants may die after two or three years of heavy infestation, particularly when larvae strip plants after hatching out in spring followed by heavy adult feeding later in summer.
– Viburnum leaf beetle invading NYC?, Cornell Horticulture Blog, May 2009
It’s been in New York City less than a decade. In Brooklyn, I first observed the damage on Viburnum dentatum, arrowwood, at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden in May 2012. Last year, I found it in Prospect Park; by May, arrowwoods there were shredded.
I’ve seen light damage on my large arrowwood for the past few years. I’ve suspected VLB, but never observed it. I’m ~1/2 mile south of Prospect Lake in Prospect Park, so it should be here. This Spring, I finally found it.
Pyrrhalta viburni, viburnum leaf beetle (VLB), 3rd instar larva, feeding on Viburnum dentatum, arrowwood, from my backyard, May 2015
Despite the fact I’ve made no special efforts to control or contain it, VLB has not gotten out of control on my single shrub. I have some hypotheses about why that might be.
My specimen is a cultivar, sold as ‘Blue Muffin.’ I suspect the plants in Prospect Park are local ecotypes planted as part of the woodlands restorations. When we select cultivars for horticultural characteristics, we select away from ecological value. It could be that this cultivar has some natural resistance to VLB.
My specimen has never fruited well. I suspect this is due to the lack of arrowwoods in other gardens nearby. This low density could affect the ability of VLB to establish a viable population that can explode to the levels I’ve observed in Prospect Park.
I specialize in gardening with native plants, and have lots of habitat in my smallish urban garden. There are likely many native predators existing in the landscape that can predate on VLB. I suspect the prevalence of natural predators in my garden have kept them in check the past few years.
By planting a wide variety of native plants, especially plants from the Asteraceae and Apiaceae, we can provide shelter and food for these insects, keeping them around for when VLB emerges.
Viburnum Leaf Beetle reaches New York City, 2009-05-28
Viburnum dentatum, Arrowwood, 2009-04-20
Viburnum leaf beetle invading NYC?, Cornell Horticulture Blog, 2009-05-22
Predation by Podisus maculiventris (Say) (Hemiptera: Pentatomidae) on Viburnum Leaf Beetle, Pyrrhalta viburni (Paykull) (Coleoptera: Chrysomelidae), Under Laboratory and Field Conditions, Gaylord Desurmont , Paul A. Weston, Environmental Entomology, Volume 37, Issue 5, pp. 1241 – 1251
Viburnum leaf beetle, Department of Horticulture, Cornell University
Viburnum Leaf Beetle – Pyrrhalta viburni, Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry