Something that I’ve mentioned before is the possibility of catching biting flies before they can bite by using a hat with something sticky on it. This idea is based on Dr. R. F. Mizell’s traps, which he originally designed for putting on slow-moving vehicles to “troll” for deer flies. But it works even better if the trap is on a person’s head, since then we are adding some actual bait to the system. Since our yard has big issues with horse flies, deer flies, black flies, mosquitos, biting midges, and the like, I had quite a lot of incentive to actually go ahead and give the whole idea a whirl over the summer. So here it is, complete with the couple of deer flies it caught within the first few minutes of use:
Here’s a very convincing lichen-mimic moth that came to the porch light on July 6, 2014. If it had been on a lichen-covered tree trunk instead of on the concrete around our front door, I doubt that I would have spotted it.
We constantly see large numbers of these little black insects on daisy blossoms. These are from July 12, 2014. The yellow center of the daisy was only about half an inch, so we can see that these are pretty small.
Pretty much every summer, we get together with a large group of friends at a site up north of here (which some of them own), that is covered with about 160 acres of “stamp sand”[1]. In 2014, this event occurred on July 5. While we were there, a group of people setting up an apparatus[2] noticed a hole about the diameter of a pencil in the sand, and looking down it they spotted something interesting. So they told me about it, and I came over with a little trowel and dug up this:
There is quite a lot of Timothy Grass[1] growing around our yard, and on July 3, 2014, Sandy spotted large numbers of these bugs infesting their seed-heads.
This was on the wall near our porch light on June 29, 2014, but I don’t think it was attracted by the light, particularly. I think it was just looking for a good crevice to pupate in. It was only about a quarter of an inch long.
We have some very elderly apple trees in our yard, and one in particular is pretty thoroughly hollowed out. Starting last year, we started noticing that the hollow part was getting stuffed with a mixture of dry grass and wood chips. Here’s what it looked like by June 29, 2014:
Sam caught this big sphinx moth when it came to our porch light on June 28, 2014. Comparing it to the palm of her hand, it looks to have a body nearly two inches long.
The coloration was pretty muted, with a couple of thin yellow “eybrows” visible in front of the incipient bald patch on the thorax.
On June 28, 2014, there were several of these fairly striking black-and-white-striped moths around our porch light.
The fairly intricate pattern of white stripes is pretty much a perfect match for the Little Virgin Tiger Moth, Grammia virguncula. The related Grammia speciosa is similar, but the lines on the wings are thinner, and the range map doesn’t show it living this far east.
I found this large insect mostly dead (it was still twitching) in the road on June 27, 2014.
By “large”, I mean about an inch long, as we can see by comparing it to my thumb and forefinger: