As we approach summer, and insect diversity spikes, this bird guy starts to scale down his search image to look for bees and other interesting bugs. I find this zoomed in perspective useful for understanding a bird’s world – they are aware of invertebrates and their behavior in ways we’ll never understand, because their lives depend on it. So yesterday, when some cool bugs caught my eye in the nature playground at Mass Audubon’s Long Pasture sanctuary, I decided to try to see the world like a bird, and take a macro look at what the insects were up to.
It began when I noticed one of my all-time favorite insects, a cuckoo wasp, prowling around on a climbing log filled with holes made by perhaps multiple types of insect - wasps, beetles, or both. Cuckoo wasps are tiny, shockingly shiny, truly gorgeous green wasps that lay eggs in the nests of other bugs, sort of like their namesake birds. You might know this behavior around here from Brown-headed Cowbirds as well, but overall it’s much more common among insects. This one was darting around on this tall stump, snooping into holes, presumably looking for a nest to lay eggs in.
Nearby on a profusely flowering Gray Dogwood, a hard-to-find shrub much loved by birds and bees, I saw one of the bigger solitary bees, a Hawthorne Mining Bee, an important pollinator of fruit trees, plus several other native bee species. Back on the logs, more drama was unfolding. Some small flies I didn’t recognize were looking a bit suspicious to me in the way they were loitering.
I took a short video so I could use the iNaturalist app to figure them out later. It turned out they were a kind of really small robber fly called, brilliantly, a Common Micropanther. They apparently sit on tree trunks, facing down, then dart out to grab and devour some other flying insect. Whoever is assigning common names to insects these days is a marketing genius – it may be a weird little fly, but how can you not love something called a micropanther? And as if micropanthers could get any cuter, I even saw a male performing a courtship flight for a female on a different stump.
I don’t have nearly enough time to get into everything I saw on this bug safari, though it lasted maybe 20 minutes in an area the size of a living room. Like the much larger robber fly in the genus Laphria that perfectly mimics bumblebees, such that you would have no idea it wasn’t, in a sort of wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing trick to seem harmless before flying out and snatching some unsuspecting insect, often an actual bumblebee. Or the two different tiny ichneumon wasps, the ones with super long “stingers” they actually just use to lay eggs in some poor larva deep inside a tree. Or the Canadian Potter Wasp, or the busy carpenter ants dumping sawdust out a crack in another stump.
This tiny but potent nature playground was also hosting a hummingbird nest and a Downy Woodpecker nest drilled right into one of the climbing logs. Between the birds and the bugs, they’re really putting the nature in nature playground there at Long Pasture sanctuary. I couldn’t have identified most of these things without the remarkable iNaturalist app – try it if you haven’t. But first you have to find the bugs. For that, you just need to make like a bird, and take a bug-eyed look around your yard.
