droning cicadas & drone photos

Heard the first cicadas of the year yesterday evening. Since it sang only at dusk (and stopped singing when it got dark), I am guessing that it was the Northern Dusk-singing Cicada (Neotibicen auletes). The song is loud and buzzing/pulsing, starting out crescendo and accelerando and then, after hitting loud full volume, trails off at the end before stopping abruptly. It made a nice accompaniment to the flashing fireflies which were moderately numerous.

Another feature of the evening's entertainment was the appearance of a small, fluttering, fast-flying bat above the tree-tops and intermittently visible from the front deck, flying above the open area in front of the deck. Don't know what species it might have been: Little Brown Bat? a Pipistrelle?

We had a recent visitor who is a professor of planning and environment and he brought along a drone which he uses in his work. In the process of showing how it works, he/it took some aerial photos of our place, reproduced below. The first shows (l. to r.) a view looking north, showing Weesuck Creek, Little Weesuck, the Aldrich Boat Yard and a neighbor's house and dock; the other shot shows part of Pine Neck across Weesuck Creek (Shinnecock Bay and Dune Road in the distance). The next photo shows our house with its adjacent porch and cottage (barn) in the middle of an oak/hickory woodland; the next picture in the second row is looking south toward Bay Avenue and the Town Dock but showing a part of our Clapper Rail marsh with its open water area in the middle and, again, Shinnecock Bay and Dune Road in the background. The final shot is of our eastern edge including our tidal pond, another part of the marsh and our thin dune line on Weesuck Creek.

Eric Salzman.