Time to Smell the Roses

Brooklyn smells like roses this week. 

Well, maybe not everywhere -- but the parks smell great. I was home for a week-long stay-cation and I took a walk in nearby Brooklyn Bridge Park every day. The air was sweet with the scent of roses and I recommend a visit while they are still in bloom. And when you pause to smell them, take a look inside.

You might find a rose weevil, making holes.

Or a lovely half-green sweat bee.

Or maybe a honeybee with its pollen sacs full of yellow rose pollen. 

Or a Japanese beetle. Click on the photos to enlarge. 

Or even a pair of common eastern bumblebees double-teaming. 

There's lots more going on in there. Take a look. And a sniff. 

Walking in Central Park

Agopostomen virescens, called the half-green sweat bee, bicolored bee, and half-green Agopostomen, collecting pollen from a rose. 
Click to enlarge. 

Every day last week at lunchtime, I walked in Manhattan's Central Park; it is right across the street from the American Museum of Natural History where I work. Yesterday, I led a nature walk there for museum members. Here are pictures of some interesting urban wildlife that you can see in the park right now. 

Red eared slider turtles are basking at the lake as if posing for photos. Be on the lookout around the park for turtles digging holes and laying eggs and try to give them privacy. We saw a red eared slider preparing a nest hole.

Ladybug eggs are hatching under the leaves into aphid-eating larvae. They look like tiny alligators. 

There are lots of baby starlings out there. 

I saw this pair of Chinese softshell turtles in the lake. Their long flexible necks are retracted, demonstrating what I think of as their turtleneck-sweater look. 

This insect is about 1/8 of an inch long and looked deceptively like an ant until magnified. It's a weevil in the genus Myrmex -- one of many kinds of beetle. Note the clubbed antennae on its weevily snout. 

These are just some of many many interesting things you can see in city parks right now. Take a walk in the spirit of Robert Frosts's A Prayer in Spring. 

...And make us happy 

in the happy bees, 

The swarm dilating 

round the perfect trees.

And make us happy 

in the darting bird

That suddenly 

above the bees is heard...