Insect Year in Review 2021

Observing the diversity of life that coexists in one place is one of the rewards of visiting the same natural area over a long period of time. My garden not only offers myself and passersby such an observatory. It's also a laboratory in which I can research how insects engage with their environment - both biotic and abiotic - and imagine, design, and create habitat to better provide for their needs.

I use iNaturalist to document the diversity of life in my garden. Although I only posted my first iNaturalist Observation in 2017, my garden Observations now span more than a decade. As of this year, I've documented over 400 insect species making use of my garden.

This biodiversity, and my documentation of it, is intentional. And although all of this is by design, all I can do is uncover the latent urban biodiversity in and around my garden. Each new species I find is a surprise to me.

Standing Still 2021: Demeter Waiting

Today is the December solstice: the winter solstice in my hometown Northern hemisphere, summer in the Southern.

Persephone and her Pomegranate

The millenia-old story of Persephone and her pomegranate, in all their incarnations, strikes me as a deeper analogy this Winter. Persephone was abducted, held hostage in hell, and starved. Only under this extreme duress did she eat anything she was offered: a few seeds of the pomegranate to stave her hunger.

I can relate to "being held hostage in hell". I feel as though I've endured six years of it. I know others do, as well.

Garden Design Pattern Languages

Adapted from a tweet thread.

In a guest post on the ASLA's "Dirt" column, Alden E. Stone, CEO of Nature Sacred, writes:

[Our new report] is part research and part practical guide, and shares key insights gained through having co-created more than 100 Sacred Places across the country in communities, many under-resourced; in prisons, at universities, and in hospitals. A handful of these sites were also implemented as part of an expansive, decade-long design, build, and research project. ...

For the research portion of this paper, we focused our attention on four domains: nature’s impact on individual, community, economic and ecological health. ...

for many of the individual and community health benefits to kick in, people must engage with nature. Spend time in the green space. And this is where Nature Sacred has spent a lot of energy over the past two decades — looking at how to best engage the community and how to best design so that the community embraces, and spends time in, their green space.

She describes four "design elements":

• Portal
• Path
• Destination
• Surround

These design patterns recur in many different types of gardens, whether intentionally healing/sacred or not.

My backyard embodies all four elements. What follows is an exploration of the history of my backyard, from inception to its current state, viewed through the frame of those four design elements.

Names

2022-12-01 (World AIDS Day): Added more Related Content links.

2022-09-20: Where available, added locations of panels in the AIDS Quilt.

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These are some of the people, all men, I have lost over the years, nearly all to AIDS. With the exceptions of those additions noted, I stopped actively maintaining this list in 1994. In alphabetical order.

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• William "Wolf" Agress, a lover, died in 1990
• Andre, a bartender at the Tunnel Bar in the East Village, now defunct
• Vincent Barnes
• Jerry Bihm
• Bobby
• Colin Curran
• Erez Dror, co-owner and -founder of the Black Hound Bakery in the East Village, New York City, now defunct (AIDS Quilt Block #3452)
• Jeffrey "Jeff" Glidden, 1958-1987, a lover (AIDS Quilt Blocks #0912 and #5320)
• Paul "Griff" Griffin
• Martin Noel Jorda
• David Kirschenbaum, 1962-1993, community organizer with the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project
• Art "Artie" Kohn, 1947-1991, founder of the BackRoom BBS in New York City, now defunct (AIDS Quilt Block #2324)
• John Larsen, a lover, died 2007 (Added 2021-12-01)
• Jim Lewis
• Luis
• John Mangano, 1955-1991 (AIDS Quilt Block #3613)
• Jeffrey Martin
• Morris Matthews
• David Mayer (Added 2021-12-01)
• Karl Michalak, 1958-1997
• Mark Melvin, 1962-08-27 - 1992-06-03 (AIDS Quilt Block #2828)
• Norm
• Tony Panico, my first lover in New York City, and the first person close to me to die from AIDS. His name appears twice on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the first on Panel 05A when it was displayed in 1988. (AIDS Quilt Blocks #0046 and #0652)
• Charles Pope, barfly extraordinaire
• Gordon Provencher, 1955-1992 (AIDS Quilt Block #2291)
• Tom Raleigh
• Craig Rodwell, 1940-1993, founder of the Oscar Wilde Bookstore in Greenwich Village, NYC
• Tony Rostron
• Jurgen Schmitt
• Giulio Sorrentino
• Buddy Volani
• Jeremy Wells
• David Joseph Wilcox, 1957-1996

Grief and Gardening: Extinct Plants of northern North America 2021

As in past years, I'm limiting this list to northern North America for two reasons:

1. Restricting this list geographically is in keeping with my specialization in plants native to northeastern North America.
2. There are many more tropical plants, and plant extinctions, than I can manage.

Last year, this paper:

Vascular plant extinction in the continental United States and Canada

caused me to expand my list from 6 to 59 species, including 7 extinct in the wild. The summary is terse, and grim:

Hot Sheets Habitat

My garden is registered as both a National Wildlife Federation Backyard Wildlife Habitat and Xerces Society Pollinator Habitat. The insects have certainly gotten the message. During 2021, I've been able to document 14 different species of insects mating in my garden.

1. Acanthoscelidius acephalus, minute seed weevil
2. Epitrix fuscula
3. Harmonia axyridis, multi-colored lady beetle (introduced)
4. Eumerus
5. Orthonevra nitida, wavy mucksucker
6. Syritta pipiens, compost fly (introduced)
7. Toxomerus geminatus, Eastern calligrapher fly
8. Toxomerus marginatus, margined calligrapher fly
9. Xenox tigrinus, tiger bee fly
10. Jalysus, stilt bug
11. Lygaeus kalmii ssp. angustomarginatus, Eastern small milkweed bug
12. Hylaeus modestus, modest masked bee
13. Xylocopa virginica, large Eastern carpenter bee
14. Danaus plexxipus, monarch butterfly

Annie, 2009-2021

Our dear cat Annie passed away less than an hour ago.

Documenting Insect-Plant Interactions

2021-10-29: Transcribed and updated my October 20th tweet thread on this topic. 

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I'm an active contributor to iNaturalist. While I'm not a "super-observer", I expect to surpass 11,000 Observations by Halloween, two days away.

Insect-Plant interactions are the majority of my iNaturalist Observations. I use the Observation Field: Interaction->Visited Flower Of to record which flowers insects are visiting, or lurking upon. Roughly 1/3 of my Observations use that field.

Both the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) and Global Biotic Interactions database (GloBI) automatically import iNaturalist Research Grade observations with an appropriate Creative Commons license. I'll use one of my iNaturalist Observations as an example to show how it all works together.

iNaturalist Workshops, The High Line, Saturday September 25

Updated 2021-09-25: Added Links and QR Codes to "Getting Started with iNaturalist".

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I'm pleased to announce that Saturday, September 25th, I will be leading two iNaturalist Workshops "in the field" at The High Line. This is one of several workshops, and many other events, they have scheduled for Insectageddon, which runs from 3-6pm that Saturday afternoon.

I'll be doing two walks:

• 3:15-4:15 pm
• 4:45-5:45 pm

When not out on one of the walks, I'll have a table in The High Line's Chelsea Market Passage, between 15th and 16th Streets. Please sign up there for one of the two workshops, as space will be limited. Each walk will start out from that location.

iNaturalist Workshop
Hosted by Chris Kreussling, aka “Flatbush Gardener”
Join Chris Kreussling for a walk on the High Line to explore plant and insect interactions and learn about the citizen scientist observation gathering tool iNaturalist. Tours begin at 3:30 and 4:45; please sign up upon arrival at Chris’s table in Chelsea Market Passage. Chris is a Brooklyn naturalist and gardener specializing in gardening with native plants to create habitat for pollinators and other invertebrates.

Visiting the High Line

Note that there are weekend restrictions in place for visitors to The High Line. You must register for timed entry; pre-registration is highly recommended. The only weekend entrances open are at Gansevoort Street, 23rd Street, and 30th Street. 

Please give yourself plenty of time to get to my table in Chelse Market Passage for the start of the walk. The 14th Street entrance is exit-only on weekends. The closest weekend entrance is Gansevoort Street, at the corner of Washington Street, the southern end of The High Line. This entrance is just three blocks south of 14th Street.

Getting Started with iNaturalist

1. Sign up at https://www.inaturalist.org/signup
   
   
   
   
   
   • You must be 13 or older.
   • You can link to your existing social media account, such as Twitter or Facebook
   • If you don't have an existing social media account you want to link to, you can create a new account with a valid email address
2. If you have existing photos you want to identify, you can begin uploading them to iNaturalist through your Web browser.
3. Recommended: Also install the iNaturalist app on your Android phone or iPhone or other Apple device. Be sure to link it to the account you just created. You can then take photos on your phone and upload them directly to iNaturalist.
   
   Android:
   https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.inaturalist.android
   
   
   
   
   Apple/iPhone:
   https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/inaturalist/id421397028?mt=8
   
   
   
   
   

Related Content

Native Pollinator Walks, Wave Hill, Sunday, June 27, 2021-06-14
Pollinator Safari: Urban Insect Gardening with Native Plants, 2019-06-23
NYC Wildflower Week  Tour of my Gardens, 2016-05-15
NYC Wildflower Week Pollinator Safari of my Gardens, 2014-06-21

Links

iNaturalist

Getting Started

Grief & Gardening: 20 Years

Written spontaneously as a Twitter thread, and transcribed to this blog post.

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I'm avoiding the news today. As well as the retraumatizing snuff porn documentaries. I've written about all of it before. I don't feel the need to day to write any more. I wrote this 15 years ago about Anniversaries, my first "Grief & Gardening" post:

The ways we observe anniversaries is arbitrary. For example, I was shocked to tears for weeks by the Indian Ocean Tsunami of 2004, which killed 100 times more people than Katrina [1st Anniversary]. The earthquake which precipitated it left the entire planet ringing like a bell. The observation of "25 Years of AIDS" at this year's World AIDS Congress is pinned only to the first official report of a cluster of unusual deaths by the Centers for Disease Control in June of 1981. The timelines of epidemics don't follow our categorizations of them.
Grief & Gardening #1: 1, 5 and 25, 2006-09-04