8 October 2024
Hen migration was intense over Pittsburgh on Friday night time, 4 October, when greater than 20,000 songbirds flew south overhead. We noticed the outcomes on Saturday morning in Frick Park the place a brand new cohort of species had arrived with excellent news: A few of them had been consuming noticed lanternflies!
The brand new species included ruby-crowned kinglets, white-throated sparrows, yellow-bellied sapsuckers and yellow-rumped (myrtle) warblers. The combination was fairly a change from September’s warblers.
Many of the new arrivals had been feeding on tiny bugs however the juvenile sapsucker, pictured above, was drawn to candy lanternfly honeydew on ailanthus timber. He was too younger to have ever seen a noticed lanternfly however he was curious. “Are these edible?”
Sure.
Maybe the sapsucker obtained the concept from a northern cardinal that ate a lanternfly additional down the path. (I don’t have a photograph of that incident; this one is from iNaturalist, New York.)
matthew_wills by way of iNaturalist)
Olive-sided flycatchers eat noticed lanternflies, too, although they don’t contribute a lot in Pittsburgh as a result of they’re uncommon right here.
Nevertheless, when an olive-sided flycatcher was passing by way of Howard County, Maryland in early September Mei Shyong photographed it consuming a noticed lanternfly. The thumbnail beneath is only a trace. Click on right here or on the picture to see her picture at Howard County Concervancy on Fb.
