Since December is one of the leanest months for finding insects to post, we decided to make a special effort to find this one on December 21, 2014. There are cattails growing in the swamp north of the house, and some of the seed-heads hang onto their “fluff” as an untidy mass through the winter. This retention of their fluff is because the seed-head is infested with these caterpillars, who bind the whole thing together with silk:
Last fall, Sandy shot a deer that had quite a nice set of antlers, good enough that she wanted to go ahead and mount it properly. It turns out that there is a taxidermist up in Calumet who prepares “European mounts”, which is a mount of just the skull and antlers, no skin. And in order to get the bones completely defleshed, without missing any little crevices, he has a big colony of dermestid beetles to do the job. And, he let me get some pictures. Here is a skull that they were working on at the time:
So, on November 6, 2014, I was in my office at work, and noticed a good-sized spider scurry across the floor. Then about 10 minutes later, it scurried back. And then again after about another 10 minutes. And again. I could see that it was another European House Spider (Tegenaria domestica), a species which I’ve already posted a few times, so I was going to let it be. But, after about the 5th or 6th time scurrying across the same patch of open floor, I figured that this one must really want to be photographed, so I caught it in a jar and brought it home. Here it is on my index finger, for scale:
There were a couple of these green leafhoppers with bright red eyes that came to our porch light on September 19, 2014.
The jumping legs are pretty long relative to the size of the insect, and they can jump quite a long way.
Rosie spotted this little, pale yellow-green crab spider on our window sill on September 19, 2014.
I think this is a half-grown female Goldenrod Crab Spider, Misumena vatia. At the moment she’s not very big or colorful, but if I have the ID right, then on maturing she’d be either white or canary yellow, with red stripes on the sides of her abdomen. I think we can see the red stripes just starting to form in this next picture.
The road leading up to our house goes through a section where it was cut down through congomerate rock. This produced a rather pronounced cliff face running alongside the road for several hundred feet. So, on September 13, 2014, while pushing my bike up the hill, I looked over at the cliff and noticed what looked like a cocoon made out of gravel hanging suspended underneath a projecting rock.
This silver-gray moth was a fairly large specimen (close to an inch long) that came to the porch light on September 7, 2014. I believe it is one of the Owlet moths.
Unfortunately, so far that’s the best I can do. I’ve had zero luck narrowing it down any further.
These were out in some numbers on October 14, 2014, like they are every year. While I was bicycling home, I kept catching them in my eyes and teeth, so I figured it was time to catch a few of them for photos. Their bodies were only about 3 mm long, so the photos aren’t as sharp as I might like[1].
The adult caddisflies I’ve posted in the past were drawn to our porch light and caught in November, but these were a bit earlier, coming to the light on September 19, 2014.
This quietly attractive reddish-brown moth is from the porch light on September 7, 2014. It was about an inch long, give or take a bit.
As is so often the case with moths and caterpillars, as far as identifying it I’ve gone up on the rocks and commenced to sink fast. And the folks on BugGuide appear to be similarly mystified.