A first attempt at a brush with nature and a solo excursion. Our hostess had appointment with her doc mid afternoon so I had rooted around on iNaturalist looking for potential dragonfly sites in the vicinity.I found a park and recreation area called Deep Run about 20 minutes away by car..
We are drawing very close to the end of the flight season so options, if they existed at all, would be very limited but you never know. There had been a sighting of a darter, which is a late season genus so we set out with fingers crossed. If all else failed, it looked like a pleasant enough environment just for a wander.
The park has two modestly sized lakes. Each has a fountain in the middle, which is a less than great sign but there did appear to be some margins that could prove of interest.
We wandered around both lakes and found nothing. There didn’t even seem to be any other flying critters in the sunlit vegetation, which I thought strange.
There was a wooden observation deck with some sunny seating covered by a wooden roof and surrounded by some trees. Whilst there might have been no insects, it didn’t take long before birdlife came to my rescue. Some previous visitor had scattered seed along a wooden handrail beneath the trees and these were being visited by a chickadee (like our tits) and what was clearly some form of nuthatch.
It took me a while with the fast-moving nuthatch but I got a few shots on the handrail. It isn’t exactly a typical nuthatch pose, though, and every now and then it behaved more typically by hanging head-down on a tree trunk. Eventually I was happier. Without reference books, resorting to Google Lens (best avoided in the UK being America-centric), this proved to be a White-breasted Nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis).
The chickadee was more complicated, there being two very similar options: Black-capped Chickadee and Carolina Chickadee. There are very few places where their ranges overlap but, of course, this is one location where they do..My suspicion is that our suspect is most likely the Carolina Chickadee (Poecile carolinensis) – it’s common in Virginia and has less white on the wings, allegedly.
I was a little surprised that the numerous Grey Squirrels – at least they are native here and not an invasive species – were not setting about vacuuming up the birdseed; they certainly would have been in the UK.
Wearing my trusty brimmed Tilley hat, any overhead vision is cut off by the brim but Francine spotted a whole load of what were obviously now uninhabited insect nests in the roof over our seating area. “They look like organ pipes”, she remarked. Obviously someone else had thought the same; these are the distinctive nesting tubes” of a wasp aptly called the Organ Pipe Mud Dauber (Trypoxylon politum).
Wandering further we found a sheltered hedgerow basking in the later afternoon sun. While I was trying to catch a difficult-to-identify black wasp-like insect (maybe an ichneumon of some kind), at long last a dragonfly turned up and flew back and forth along the hedge, sadly without settling. It was clearly one of what the Americans call a Darner, or Hawker in our terms, but I’ll never know which.
Nonetheless, I had a modest collection of additions to my catalogue, albeit not what I was primarily after.
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