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Insecta: Lepidoptera
Oecophoridae, Stathmopodinae
Stathmopoda orbiculata

Lam Tsuen San Tsuen, Tai Po, Hong Kong.

This is the second record of this small (6mm long) moth in Hong Kong

The Stathmopodinae have a very distinctive resting posture and heavily bristled legs - an unmistakeable combination!

Note that Stathmopodinae is regarded by some taxonomists as a valid family within the Gelechioidea, and was treated as such in the overview of Lepidoptera by van Nieukirken et al., 2011

Cattle Egret
with Barn Swallow it has caught
Dry Tortugas, Florida
1 May 1988

Cattle Egrets are a species known to wander. They made it to the U.S. on their own in the early 1950s and are now a common species all over the Americas. I once found a dead Cattle Egret on a rocky beach in Antarctica. There are no insects on Antarctica, so that particular Cattle Egret just wandered too far. Such might be said for Florida's Dry Tortugas. They are called "dry" for good reason. There is no fresh water. Birds that end up there and are too tired to move on, simply die. It is a daily task of employees at Fort Jefferson to walk around and pick up and discard the Cattle Egret carcasses before they open the fort to the birdwatchers each spring day. On this day my group watched a starving Cattle Egret (there are few large insects for the egrets to feed on) grab a Barn Swallow. It certainly made for a strange scene!

The first time I had ever seen this, i videoed the entire event as well from entry to exit. It was as if this species swims all the time. I sent it to a frogmouth expert and she had never seen that before. The bird chose to swim and flew away very easily after its swim. There appeared to be no explanation for the bird swimming as it was not particularly hot or anything unusual.