I just noticed that I never bothered to mention here that I finished the second edition of Leafminers of North America last December. Apparently I quietly updated the page dedicated to that book and then went back to working on other writing projects, including my guide to sawfly larvae and various papers on leafminers and other herbivorous insects. Of course all of the leafminer book subscribers received the last installment of the second edition at that time, and I sent out the first monthly installment of the third edition last month. So if you’ve been meaning to subscribe, now is a good time! Details are on that page (or you can click the image of the book cover below), and it’s still true that you can have the whole first edition for as little as $5, as explained here.

Also, someone just asked if there will be a calendar this year, and yes, a box of them is on the way to me right now! As usual, I will send a copy to anyone who makes a donation of at least $30 (the amount WordPress charges me each year to keep this blog free of annoying ads) before the end of November, which you can do here (select “Send,” and then include your mailing address in the notes). In this year’s calendar, some months have a single full-page photo and some show an adult leafminer along with its larval mine.

Also, I will be back at Eagle Hill in Maine next summer, teaching a week-long “Leaf and Stem Mining Insects” seminar the week of August 4. Their 2024 schedule isn’t on their website yet, but I suspect it isn’t too early to get yourself a spot if you contact them about it.

And also, one reason that things have been pretty quiet on this blog lately is that earlier this year, Julia and I had a baby girl, Ayla (pronounced eye-la). But the main reason is that this summer, we took Ayla on a six-week road trip—during which she got to meet two other baby girls at the International Congress of Dipterology in Reno, Nevada, where I was invited to speak about leaf-mining flies, and she also got to hang out with some moth people at the Lepidoptera Course at the Southwestern Research Station in Arizona, where I invited myself to visit and speak about leaf-mining moths on our way home—and as a result I’ve been extra busy with work (and bug rearing projects) ever since. Here’s Ayla examining a columbine flower in Arizona and an “oak apple” gall in Oklahoma (she determined the latter to be crunchy and full of ants):

Now the reports I had to do for other people are in, and almost all of my bugs are put away in the fridge for the winter, so I expect BugTracks will become a little more active as I go through all my photos from this year. In the meantime, if you know your western and midwestern plants, I’d appreciate any help you can offer identifying the hosts of the leafminers I found this summer, which are all posted on iNaturalist. I’m slowly getting caught up with reviewing everyone else’s leafminer observations in the Leafminers of North America project; I’m up to early September now, with just 4300 or so left to go! iNaturalist’s “computer vision” AI has improved greatly in recognizing leafminer species, so that I now can often select the correct identification from a dropdown list of its top guesses, but of course what makes things most efficient is when the (human) observer has made an informed identification (e.g. by using my book) and all I have to do is click “agree” and move on. One of the projects I’m currently focusing on is another big paper on agromyzid flies with Owen Lonsdale, which will include a number of new host records, new distribution records, and new species based on specimens that various iNaturalist users reared when I asked them to follow up on some particularly interesting finds.

Okay, I think those are all my announcements for now!