NYFalls.com Talk

I just had the coolest sighting! I've been fascinated by these for the longest time but never saw one until a few minutes ago. I ran back to the office and grabbed my camera, and I managed to get one shot before it flew off. Boy, are they fast! In my search to identify exactly which species this was, I discovered that there's actually a website named hummingbirdmoths.com. I didn't bother to link it, but the intro is pretty humorous.

Hummingbird clearwing:

they look like fighter jets

http://www.birds-n-garden.com/hummingbird_moths.html

mconheady wrote:they look like fighter jets

They do look like fighter jets, at rest. But having seen my first specimen, I don't think that they're at rest very often. It's easy to see how someone might think that they're baby hummingbirds. There are some really nice photos of them on the site that I linked previously, if you click on additional images of a particular species. The site that I mentioned when I posted the photo also has a really nice photo gallery, set to music, but there's no way to skip the intro page which is only cute the first time you visit the site.

You certainly got some amazing shots at the butterfly conservatory, Matt.

Are there Lantern Flies in the area?

I don't believe so. They appear to be from tropical regions. I'd never even heard of them, but Entomology isn't my forte. The closest thing that we have (as far as glowing goes) are lightning bugs/fire flies. Our property is a virtual light show in late June/early July. It's very cool to see, because we don't have much light pollution here so it's very dark at night.

we don't, but who knows what will happen when as the climate shifts.
We have a cousin of them, the cicada

We have leaf hoppers too, but the lantern flies look much more colorful. It will be interesting to see how species change/shift. Oh, but wait, there's no such thing as global warming!

One night, we turned out the lights and there was something glowing on our wall, it was a lightning bug glowing in our room. It was very cool.