Visiting Governor's Island after the cold front came through

Ed and David Ringer and I decided to visit Governor's Island this Sunday, July 30th, the first cool day after an extended span of very hot weather.

We planned to catch the 11 am ferry. David found us already sitting inside the ferryboat as he had been running a bit late thanks to erratic subway timing on the weekends.

Once on the island, we walked up towards Fort Jay, looking at the wildflower plantings, and then climbed up onto the glacis -- the grassy slopes surrounding the Fort. This is where I have often found day-flying moths during some of my previous visits. We flushed out a few cool moths and then decided to descend the stone steps into the moat, where I could see that, in one section of the moat, the groundskeepers had left a fairly wide central strip of weeds unmown.

In the moat we found some campion leafminers, a number of different new-to-us good species of moths, as well as a couple of large black/blue wasps and a 3-lined beetle.

After climbing out of the moat we walked over to Castle Williams, where we ate lunch at a picnic table. David and I looked, but we could find no large clumps of Big-Bract Vervain, or any Slender Snake Cotton just south of the Castle, where I had found those unusual species of plants a few years ago.

We then walked over to Blazing Saddles. We had to rent a large surrey, as they were out of small ones. We peddled over to the Harbor School garden, where we found a lot of beautiful Harlequin Stink Bugs living on some sort of Kale. The cherry tomatoes were not being harvested there even though they were superbly sweet and delicious. I also found a climbing milkweed.

Then we peddled across the island and south to the Lavender Field. There were no butterflies, but there were a huge number of mixed dragonflies hunting over the strip of grass by the big ancient wall at the back.

Then we went to the Urban Farm. Ed stayed sitting in the surrey while David and I walked around the farm. We found galls, and some nice flying insects too, but no butterflies.

After that we peddled back to Blazing Saddles to return the surrey, and then walked over to the ferry terminal.

One of the ferries was out of service, so we had to wait for the other one.

Governors Island was the busiest I have ever seen it.

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