Spotted Bird Grasshopper

Last year I made a number of a trips to Sylvan Runkel State Preserve which is northeast of Onawa in Monona County.  The preserve sits in the Loess Hills of far western Iowa and is the subject of this blog’s header photo.  I first traveled to this site in mid-June to look for Strecker’s Giant [...]

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A Trip to the ISU Insect Collection

This morning I had the opportunity to visit the Iowa State University insect collection for the first time.  MJ Hatfield and Dr. Royce Bitzer were kind enough to arrange for me to spend several hours cataloging the Iowa tiger beetle specimens.  I made it about halfway through the Cicindelidae drawers which added up to about [...]

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Not for the faint of heart…

Last Saturday my friend Jim and I hiked to a rather remote wildlife area in central Iowa to look for wintering Northern Saw-whet Owls.  These tiny yet fearless owls often roost in small cedar trees, usually in a spot that is out of the wind in a stream valley, or sheltered by thick vegetation like [...]

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Where have all the Poweshiek Skipperlings gone?

Over the summer of 2008, I did some butterfly surveys for the Iowa DNR in southern Iowa.  This rekindled a long dormant interest in butterflies, and since then I have been attempting to locate and photograph all of the regularly occurring Iowa species.  So far I’ve photographed about seventy-five (of ~110), but I have a [...]

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