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Gate 8 —

A pair of house sparrows are living in the terminal. They drink from the water fountains and eat crumbs that the customers drop.

In the next terminal this summer there were three bats living! Apparently the bats mostly freaked out the customers!

A legspan of about 70 mms when stationary. And a body length of roughly about 40 mm.

It came into our hotel room two days ago via an open door and/or an open window after dark, and it flew around inside the room for a while. I thought I had scared it out again while I tried to capture it in an insect net.

But instead it must have just settled somewhere out of sight, because I suddenly saw it flying around again in the hotel room this morning, two days later.

Really a huge cranefly! With dark smokey wings and a dark body.

The hotel is on the slope of the ridge that is close to the riverbed of the Cottonwood Creek, and there are two riparian parks one right here and the other one close by.

A very pretty small juvenile shell of this species.

I added this species to the list for SW Florida in 2014. See the text here:

https://www.shellmuseum.org/shell-guidehttps://www.shellmuseum.org/post/2016/01/08/the-meta-keyhole-limpet

I saw this from about 20 feet away, flying slowly, appearing somewhat reddish, and being fairly large.

At first from a distance I thought it might be a spotted lanternfly. I watched carefully as it landed on the sidewalk, and I went over to photograph it.

I was surprised to see it was a really big wasp, and I thought at first that perhaps it might be a queen of the southern Yellowjacket,like the one I saw in the Conservatory Garden of Central Park a couple weeks ago.

But when I got a good look at it I could see it was something else, and the CV knew it was a European Hornet.