Getting by with a little help from my friends.
We have something a bit different this week, a most excellent picture of a grasshopper:
What is different about this? Well, while it is in fact a local grasshopper specimen that was found near our property, this is the first case where I didn’t take the picture. There are two reasons for this:
It helps so much when you finally get a name for it
We’ve been seeing these things sticking to walls every fall for some years now. We mostly find them on masonry walls and windows, although that doesn’t necessarily mean they prefer those surfaces – it may just be that they are easier to spot there.
Butterflies give me a lot of trouble
S_ and Sam came back from a walk on October 3 with this little butterfly perched on a small Queen-Anne’s-Lace blossom. The wings are about 2 cm wide, give or take a bit. It was 40 degrees F outside at the time, and the butterfly was cold enough that it was content to just sit there while I tried to get some decent pictures.
S. found this one climbing the wall of the garage. Despite appearances, it is not related to earwigs. It’s actually a beetle[1]. No, really!
This is a beetle, not a moth. No, really!
This poor fellow had an unfortunate encounter with a car on September 23, and I found it dead on the side of the road.
Even though it looks like a moth at first glance, it has some very un-moth-like characteristics. The orange-and-black forewings are thick and leathery, while the hindwings are membranous and transparent.
This one is actually over a year old, it was found on the kitchen floor in early August of 2007. It’s a little guy, only a couple of millimeters long. It was hard to see details with the naked eye, and I thought at the time that it was some kind of beetle. But, when magnified we can see that it doesn’t quite look right to be a beetle::
S_ spotted this one buzzing across the kitchen in late July. It was moving pretty fast, and was hard to see clearly, but it sure looked and acted like a small bumblebee. But then, it landed on the window where I was able to catch it, and it turned out to be this:
So, once again, I was pushing my bike up the hill to home, looking at what was beside the road. And in the middle of a “Queen Anne’s Lace”[1] blossom, I saw something that looked odd. There was this black wasp that appeared to be trying to stand on its head. So I looked closer, and saw that part of the flower wasn’t actually a flower – it was a crab spider that had grabbed him by the face! Unfortunately, she dropped the wasp before I could get the blossom home to get a picture, but here she is:
We had quite a plague of these European Earwigs (Forficula auricularia)[1] back in July, when there was still some moisture about. Now that it has been very dry for a few months their numbers have plummeted, but for a while there we were literally finding heaps of them every time we turned over a rock or picked up a board.
These are actually two different harvestmen[1]. The first one was photographed without the macro lens on a wall last year, and while it shows the spread of the legs nicely, there isn’t much detail on the body.
