Category Archives: Photography

I’m on Mastodon!

Just a quick post to share my account handle: @colinpurrington@flipping.rocks. Plus a screenshot of my profile page in case anyone not on Mastodon is curious what the layout is like. If you need a break from Twitter, I highly recommend the platform.

I chose the flipping.rocks instance because it’s set up for people who like exploring the natural world through photography. But I also follow people from other servers who make interesting posts about biology, geology, archaeology, food, etc. Like Twitter, you can follow anyone who brings you joy, plus block or mute those who are annoying or boring. You can also turn off “boosting” (=retweeting) for otherwise interesting people who tend to overshare. There’s a little bit of learning curve but Mastodon is a very enjoyable social media platform, full of people who like to engage rather than just lurk. Plus no ads.

If you’re interested in joining, here’s a page that lists servers (instances) by location and topic. Your choice influences how your local “feed” is populated. So if you want to see lots of posts about your home city, see whether there’s a server for that (e.g., sfba.social). Similarly, if you’re obsessed with birds, choose a server that caters to bird people (e.g., birds.town). You can also see where your Twitter friends have landed by using Twitodon or other similar services.

Blacklighting for moths at Hildacy Preserve

I’m finally getting around to posting photographs from National Moth Week (July 23-31). Over a period of perhaps three hours on July 30th I ended up with 27 moths, 3 caterpillars, 3 beetles, 2 flies, 1 cricket, 1 wasp, 1 mantisfly, 1 planthopper, and a mayfly. And, as I discovered the next morning, a bonus tick. If you want to view any of the below photographs larger, just click on them. And if you think I’ve misidentified any of them please let me know.

Here are the moths:

The moth larvae below didn’t show up to the blacklights, of course, but were loitering nearby so I captured them, too:

Below are the beetles that showed up. Stenolophus ochropezus was incredible common, with perhaps several dozen during the evening. In the future we really need to set out some sugar/beer bait to get more beetles to show up.

I have only two photographs of flies (a dance fly and a crane fly) but there were uncountable numbers of small dipterans at the lights. If I’d been thinking I would have set up my smaller lens to document them, but then I would have been there until 3 AM.

Below is the miscellaneous gallery featuring a mayfly, a wasp, a treehopper, a katydid, a green mantisfly, and a tick. The latter came home with me.

Here are all the iNaturalist observations at Hildacy Preserve that day. Currently that link just shows my photographs but hopefully others who attended that night will upload theirs, too.

Huge thanks to Mike Coll and Tanya Dapkey for organizing a fun evening.

For more details on National Moth Week, please see https://nationalmothweek.org/. For moth identification I recommend Peterson’s Field Guide to Moths of Northeastern North America, BugGuide (free!), iNaturalist (free!), and Moth Photographers Group (free!). For larvae I use David Wagner’s Caterpillars of Eastern North America.

If you live near Philadelphia, here are directions to Hildacy Preserve.