{"id":100139,"date":"2021-07-10T06:12:45","date_gmt":"2021-07-10T12:12:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.featheredphotography.com\/blog\/?p=100139"},"modified":"2021-07-10T07:33:57","modified_gmt":"2021-07-10T13:33:57","slug":"gray-catbird-interaction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/10\/gray-catbird-interaction\/","title":{"rendered":"Gray Catbird Interaction"},"content":{"rendered":"

And weird mystery insects.<\/p>\n

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Yesterday morning in the mountains this Gray Catbird started acting up as soon as ‘he’ landed on this branch in a thicket. I knew immediately that he was reacting to another nearby bird, probably another catbird. He raised his tail and…<\/p>\n

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began to flutter his wings.<\/p>\n

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I could tell by watching the direction he was looking that the second bird he was so interested in was moving around in the thicket in front of and below him. Eventually he lowered his tail but he…<\/p>\n

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continued to flutter his wings as he watched the other bird.<\/p>\n

Soon after this catbird flew off…<\/p>\n

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the second catbird came out of the thicket and landed on this stump quite close to where the first catbird had been displaying. I won’t even try to interpret the meaning of the interaction I witnessed but I do think it was interesting. And it allowed me to get this photo which I like a lot.<\/p>\n

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A little later that morning and a little further down the road I spotted some insects that have me both charmed and mystified.<\/p>\n

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I’m not sure how many of them there were around the entire diameter of this Musk Thistle flower but most of them I could see were wedged head-first between the flower cluster and the bracts (modified leaves).<\/p>\n

I thought they were cute as the dickens with their little bullseye butts sticking out but I have no idea why most of them were wedged into this unusual position. Most of the abundant pollen and nectar produced by thistles would be on and in the flower cluster rather than between the flower cluster and the bracts.<\/p>\n

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But what mystified me most was the anatomy of the insect itself. To my untrained eye they look like a cross between a bee and a beetle. Most of their characteristics seem bee-like to me, including the numerous hairs covering their bodies. But if they’re bees where are their wings?<\/p>\n

Instead these insects appear to have beetle-like wing cases (elytra) forming a hard ‘shell’ over their backs that cover and protect the posterior pair of wings used for flight.<\/p>\n

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Here’s a closeup of the individuals that were wedged head-first between the flower cluster and the bracts. It also gives us another look, from a different angle, at the presumed wing cases of the insect on the right.<\/p>\n

If I had to guess I’d say that these insects were attracted to the thistle by its abundant nectar and pollen and perhaps they spent most of their time foraging on the flowers like the individual on the left of the flower cluster. Maybe I just happened to come by while most of them were resting in a place on the thistle flower where they would be more protected from predators.<\/p>\n

Whatever the case I’d sure like to know what kind of insects they are. Any thoughts?<\/p>\n

Ron<\/p>\n

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And weird mystery insects.<\/p>\n

Continue reading<\/span><\/i><\/a> <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100142,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[334,8,3523,3507,395],"tags":[4861,683,50,4805,1839,3526,5833,3525,1557,4666,5832,311,754],"class_list":["post-100139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-birds","category-ecology-and-environment","category-gray-catbird","category-insects","category-miscellaneous","tag-bee","tag-beetle","tag-behavior","tag-bracts","tag-displaying","tag-dumetella-carolinensis","tag-elytra","tag-gray-catbird","tag-insect","tag-musk-thistle","tag-thistle-flower-cluster","tag-utah-2","tag-wing-flutter"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/gray-catbird-8189-ron-dudley.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1zzJh-q39","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100139"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100139\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100142"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/featheredphotography.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}