Thursday Birding and Bugging

 

A Blue-crowned Mot Mot with a caterpillar. A pair of these kept flying near us and often would have a caterpillar that it would rub and beat on branches - maybe to get rid of irritating hairs?

 

 

The Rufous-tailed Jacamar.

 

The Royal Flycatcher...the males have a large fan-shaped red crest of feathers that it can pull forward and expose the "fan". This one was preening its feathers so it didn't have its crest displayed.

 

Blue Hole.

 

 

An Anolis lizard along the trail leading out of Blue Hole.

 

 

 

Pinning insects with Vanessa and Matt.

 

 

Marlin joins us for more pinning of insects.

 

Matt has a Rufous-tailed Hummingbird in hand.

 

 

 

The hairs again say "Don't Touch Me" very eloquently.

 

 

Dan contends with a real bitey bat - Artibeus literatus or intermedius. Boy did he holler at times - this is what he gets for wearing only one glove and not double-gloving. Still, it was quite entertaining to hear him hollering when the bat would chomp down on Dan's fingers.

 

Dan greets his nemesis...not really his nemesis, he was just being friendly with Dan...like a puppy likes to chew to show his/her affection. 

 

Yes, he's a boy...pretty obvious huh?

 

Such a beautiful boy. This species has rapidly become one of Dan's favorite bats. They certainly have "attitude".

 

We also caught this nice Carollia perspicillata (Seba's short-tailed bat).

 

Picture taking time....

 

 

A nice juvenile Hemipteran (we did not collect this because the juveniles don't really survive pinning very well).

 

Some interesting galls on these leaves.

 

 

This is a Katydid that Justin collected...in the below photograph you can see how much trouble he had with it....

 

The Katydid from the previous photograph nearly got Justin down for the count...good thing Justin was wearing pants!

 

This is a bioluminescent click beetle - the two yellow dots glow quite brightly and unlike fireflies (which flash their lights in particular patterns), these click beetles turn on their lights for extended periods.

 

Dan showed me a neat technique using the rear-flash setting on my camera. By moving the click beetle, we achieved a cool tracing of the click beetle's bioluminescence.