﻿140 Journal New York Ent. Soc. fVoi. hi. 



LOCAL ENTOMOLOGICAL NOTES. 



Members of the New York Entomological Society and all others are solicited 

 to contribute to this column, their rare captures, local lists and other items of 

 interest relating to the insect fauna of New York city and vicinity. 



INSECTS AT WATCHOGUE AND BEULAH LAND, 

 STATEN ISLAND, N. Y. 



By William T. Davis. 



Charles Lamb is said to have preferred the city because that 

 marked changed of the seasons which he witnessed in the country was 

 nearly absent from the paved streets. But to most people this gradual 

 march of the year is pleasant — the ushering in of spring, the hospitable 

 days of summer that seem to invite you to sleep out of doors, the cool 

 invigorating autumn and the still more brisk season of winter, pass like 

 changing scenery before a car window. In the same way the varied 

 prospect offered by even so small a piece of mother earth as Staten Is- 

 land — the change from rocky hills to barren sandy tracts and salt mea- 

 dows — is ever inviting. It is pleasant to make numerous comparisons as 

 the season advances, to walk from the hills over to the sandy ground, 

 or to the meadows, for in nature comparisons are not odious. One of 

 the most interesting of these sandy tracts lies about Old Place meadow, 

 in the midst of which is the tortuous Old Place creek, an arm of the 

 Sound. The sandy point that projects northward into the meadow is 

 called Beulah by the natives in a spirit of irony, but to a naturalist it is 

 truly Beulah Land and most interesting. 



The standing or upright Clematis {^Clematis ochroleuca) grows at 

 Beulah, as does the Lupine, the Hoary Pea and many small oaks (^Quer- 

 cus hitmilis), while nearby are Moccasin flowers (^Cypripedium acaule) 

 and the Marsh Marigolds of early spring. The flower-bed arrangement 

 of plants — the little clumps of certain kinds that grow together to the 

 almost exclusion of the neighboring vegetation — is interesting and at 

 Watchogue and Beulah Land many parcels of sandy ground are given 

 up to colonies of Birds-foot Yiolets, and other equally pleasing settlers. 



In early spring, when the snow still lingers in sheltered places, the 

 beautiful deep orange, brown and black moth, Brephos iiifans, makes 

 its appearance on the borders of Old Place meadow. It is not seen 

 every spring, though of course it mtist be present, but every few years, 

 on some sunny day, it appears in numbers. It alights in the open 



