This week, I got a couple of actual, no-fooling insect nets[1], and Sam and I went out to see what we could catch. There wasn’t much (it has been kind of cold and a bit breezy of late, so flying insects big enough to see easily were pretty scarce). Then, I saw something grey, blurry and unidentifiable flying past, quickly took a swipe at it with the net – and got it! It turned out to be this:
It’s a “Plume Moth”, in the Tribe Platyptiliini. Based on the color and wing shape, I think it’s most likely in the genus Platyptilia, and it could be a somewhat faded specimen of Platyptilia carduidactyla, the Artichoke Plume Moth.
[Scene: my office, afternoon of May 21. The phone rings]
Me: Hello?
Sam: Dad! Mom caught a GIANT WATER BUG! She tried to pick it up, and it GRABBED her! She shook it off, and caught it in a DIAPER! We put it in a jar! It’s GIANT!
Me: Wow!
Sam: Well, OK. Bye! [click, hummmmmm][1]
Sam and her bug in a jar
I found this on campus, clinging to the side of the Electrical Engineering building, so I put it in a pill bottle and brought it home to photograph:
It was just about 2 centimeters long, and had a strong metallic sheen, particularly on the underside.
Last week, I was laying on the floor[1] when suddenly this fellow scurried right under my nose:
and Sam yelled, “A spider! Can we keep it?” So, we got out a little half-gallon plastic aquarium that we’ve had laying around for some years, put in some of Sam’s foam alphabet puzzle pieces to give him something to crawl on, and popped him in. We gave him a cotton ball soaked in water so he would have something to drink, and have been feeding him flies:
Wednesday afternoon was warm and sunny, for just about the first time since last fall. S_ was working out in the yard, and called me outside, saying “There’s a swarm of bees in the driveway!” And so there was. There were about 100 of these guys, circling around the light-colored, sandy parts of the driveway and flying at an altitude of about 1 to 4 inches. I tried photographing them as they flew, but they were too quick for me. It took quite a few tries, but I eventually caught one in a jar:
This could possibly be one of the most boring, hard-to-identify moths in the world. [1]. Still, I want to be comprehensive in these pages, which means I can’t just skip the boring ones.
We found it on October 21, 2007. The wingspan as it rested was about 3 centimeters, so while it wasn’t a huge moth, it wasn’t tiny, either. It was on the window of the door leading from the kitchen to the entryway, which meant that I could turn on the kitchen lights and the entryway lights and get pictures of it from both sides.
Here is the top side:
and here is the underside:
Here’s another little guy. Once again, it was found on the window, in mid-July of 2007.
The way the wings are held and the general shape makes me think it is a Tortricid moth. This one is a bit unusual, in that it actually has some lumps and bumps on its wings, giving it a more three-dimensional camouflage than most other moths have.
OK, I’ll be up front with you: I really don’t know what kind of moth this is [edit: now I do, see below]. It’s a bit over a centimeter long, and was fluttering around the light in our entryway on August 2 of 2008.
Here’s a large, furry moth that obligingly posed on the screen of our back door in mid-June of 2007.
It has the build of some of the moths in the subfamily Arctiinae, the Tiger Moths.
We regularly find these wasps building nests like this one in a bunch of places, generally anywhere that they are protected from the rain and wind. They are usually in my father-in-law’s hunting blind out back, they really like the old carriage-house, they are fond of the little enclosure that I keep beekeeping supplies in, and they really, really like the inside of the metal cover over the filling port on our propane tank[1].
