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.
We’d all just come into the house after going for a walk, and I heard Sam shouting from the kitchen “Mom, Mom, a beetle! A beetle!”, and then I heard S_ reply, “A beetle? Where is . . . Holy Cow!” So I come over to look, and they’ve got this huge scarab beetle, just about two inches long[1].
Last year I had a picture of an adult Ctenucha virginica, a striking black-and-orange tiger moth with an unpronounceable name. Well, this spring (on May 10), I found the caterpillar of the same species, climbing up a grass stem.
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