Subject: winged things
Date: Jun 21 22:05:46 2001
From: Jim McCoy - jfmccoy at earthlink.net



While bats aren't strictly aviform, they *do* have wings and begin with the
letter b, so I'm making bold to ask about them here. I was just pondering
another sighting of our local bats in an adjacent woodlot, and I wonder
whether there is any reasonable way for the untutored eye to differentiate
small bat species on the wing at dusk. Are there any bat experts out there
who are good at this sort of thing?

Speaking of winged creatures that begin with b, I found a dying flying
insect on my porch this morning (which meets the 'b' standard if I refer to
it colloquially as a 'bug'). It had a long, copper-colored abdomen,
accounting for perhaps 75-80% of its length of maybe an inch and a half, a
black-and-white striped thorax, largish wings and extraordinarily long
legs, not unlike a "daddy longlegs" spider. I saw several more of what I
took to be the same insect this evening, patrolling just centimeters above a
dirt/gravel path. Any idea what these guys are? I'm curious about what the
adaptive value of long legs on a flying insect might be in this case. I'm
currently reading the Origin of Species for the first time and my mind is
even more than usually inclined to wonder about such things just now...

Thanks for any suggestions on either front.

JMc


Jim McCoy
jfmccoy at earthlink.net
Redmond, WA