This was taken at the pond in Law Park in Briarcliff Manor, NY. On occasion I’ve seen Great Grey Herons, Cormorants and Egrets there. More recently I got a nice set of pictures of a Green Heron fishing for tadpoles.

Since I usually take the dog for a walk in Briarcliff on Saturdays I tend to pass by the park with a camera to see if there are any interesting birds around.

Lately there haven’t been, but this time I spotted a commotion in the water on the far side of the pond. I made my way over and found these two frogs. At first I thought they were playing (do frogs play?) or fighting. I suppose that the latter is still a possibility, but I started to wonder if they weren’t up to something completely different. Anyone know how to distinguish male and female frogs?

Taken with a Sony A500 and Minolta AF 100-200mm f4.5.

We filled up three bird feeders with seed the other day. My wife wanted to attract more birds to the garden and I hoped to get some pictures of them when they came. Since then we haven’t seen a single bird come to the feeders, but we have seen lots of squirrels, so many in fact that that they’ve completely cleaned out the bird feeders.

I caught this one on top of one of the brackets holding a bird feeder. He must have been disappointed because one of his brothers (or maybe him himself) had knocked the feeder off the bracket yesterday – and spilled all of the seeds onto the ground.

This didn’t seem to bother him much though. He just stretched out to sun himself for a while.

Taken with a Sony A77 II and Sigma 400mm f5.6.

I was sitting in the house the other day when I heard my wife calling me to go our an take a look at something. She has a lot of roses and they are starting to bloom, so usually when she calls me it’s to take a picture of one of them. I’d taken a lot of pictures of her flowers recently and I wasn’t too enthusiastic about going out and taking another.

This time, however, it was something different: a huge green moth. I was even able to measure it: 4 inches long; wingspan also 4 inches.

I had no idea what it was so after taking the pictures I went back into the house and ‘googled’ ‘enormous green moth NY state’. An image like that of the one in our garden was the first to come up. I guess there aren’t that many types of ‘enormous green moth’ in NY state.

It’s a Luna Moth. This one is male. Apparently the male has thicker antennae than the female.

A couple of interesting facts about luna moths. First Luna moth caterpillars click their mandibles (mouth parts) and regurgitate smelly liquids when threatened by predators; Second when a luna moth emerges it doesn’t have mouth parts to feed, it’s sole purpose is to reproduce. In this winged form it lives only one week; Third the tail can apparently fool the echo location used by bats.

Taken with a Sony A77II and Minolta Maxxum AF 50mm f2.8 Macro.