We had a brief vacation in New Jersey during the summer to visit the wife’s family. It was rainy the whole time, unfortunately, so my only window for escaping was very brief. I managed to get this Mirid plant bug that is shown in the first picture. It is from the genus Neurocolpus, and several of them were on the flowers of an unknown Legume.

I also came across several Ailanthus webworm moths (Atteva aurea), and one is shown in the next picture. Ailanthus altissima, or ‘tree of heaven’ is an introduced species that has become a bit of a pest. Very common farther east, but we have them here as well. I have not seen the lovely little moth where I live, however.

Back at home, I had an outing in a park where I ventured far off trail into the woods. There, I came upon this female scorpionfly (Panorpa) feeding on bird poo. Scorpionflies are carnivores, but I suspect they do most of their feeding on dead insects. The bird droppings were chock full of goodies. After several minutes of energetic probing, she dragged out the carcass of a rove beetle. Mmm-mmm.

Excellent, Mark. Great images. I was looking at a photo today that I took last summer of a Red-spotted purple feeding on an owl casting.

Ailanthus altisima is the preferred host plant for Spotted lanternfly, Lycorma delicatula, an invasive species that has become a serious threat to the fruit crop here. My boss had a brilliant idea - "we can plant a bunch more Ailanthus altisima and then when the bugs go there, we just blast them with pesticide!" I told him I had a better idea. How about we pull out the existing Ailanthus altisima and deprive the Spotted lanternfly of its larval host plant?

Mike

Sorry The rest of my post did not send Here is what I'm looking for.
A friend just came by with a mint condition, Pentax K1000 35mm film body.
I offered to help in selecting lenses, any suggestions for three all around lenses would be appreciated.
We are looking to cover all amateur bases, macro lens, wide angle walking around lens, medium distance telephoto, long distance telephoto, or fixed lens.
I guess a 24, 28, or 50mm fixed would cover main wide angle lens, maybe a 24-70 mm, or 50-110 mm for medium distance images, and fixed, or telephoto with 250, 300, or 400 mm max, for long distance images.
I have Canon equipment, and am just now researching pentax glass. I should have a better idea of what I'm looking for in the next few days.
Thanks,
Thrash50

Hi

Cleaning out Mom’s attic, and found a rig for my daughter (cool), but also found some older Quantaray lenses for Minolta. Ebay says now not worth much, barely the cost of shipping. Before donating to good will, wanted to see if anyone here can ACTUALY use them. If so, free if you play shipping.

1) Quantaray 28-28 AF f3.5-5.6 zoom. Model 25-166-4710
2) Quantaray 70-300 AF f4-5.6 zoom. Model 25-166-4546

Condition. If I had not known she used them, I would put “new in box”. They still have original box, packing, etc. Still in original plastic baggies. So, would have to say “like new”

Would rather have them go to a good home than goodwill. Also, I will be contacting local HS to see if they can use them (not holding out much hope), but if your local HS can use them and you want to pay shipping, let me know

Contact be via PM for more info

As an amateur picture taker who drifted in and out of the hobby several times, and having to meet no quality standard other than my own, I now have about 1000 slides and about the same number of negatives I took in my younger years. Some of them are really poor quality and I wonder why I didn't just throw them out at the time. Now I'm glad I didn't. Post processing software incorporating AI and other technology is enabling us to salvage some, even most, of those old photos and of course some of the less than marginal digital images.

My suggestion to the younger members of the UHH community is save everything. Storage is cheap. Get a 4 TB external hard drive save all your culls by year. When you fill it up get another. A lot of the culls you save will be snap shot quality, slightly out of focus or something but when you get to my age and are sitting around with your cronies, kids/grandkids you will remember something that happened in 2019 that you vaguely remember taking a picture of. You will not believe how many times I have gone through most of those slides to find one from 1960 and if you think you have that 2019 picture you will too. At least you won't have to look at individual slides and negs.

I had only one type of tadpoles from the same egg mass. Yes, I believe these to be frog tads, I know frogs are in the garden. Sorry you lost at scrabble, time for practise. Regarding habitat, over here at the moment house developers are netting hedges and trees around where they are building to reduce bird populations, I cannot imagine why they would want to do that. Fortunately, people are pulling down the netting. In response the builders are sometimes pulling the whole hedge out and replacing it with a fence.