So, way back in the summer of 2016 we built a small decorative pond in our back yard. It’s about 12 feet long, 8 feet wide, and maximum 5 feet deep, with a circulating filter and a waterfall. It has turned into a favored spot for all sorts of small creatures; frogs, dragonflies, other aquatic insects, the birds like to bathe in the waterfall, and so forth. We even put in some small goldfish the next year, that successfully overwintered in the pond and lived there for about 5 years. And then last evening (August 20, 2022), Sandy spotted this bird hanging around the edge of the pond:
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Near the end of June, Sam found this pupa (which at the time was alive and wiggly) in the garden soil. It is probably one of the owlet moths, probably one of the cutworms, but I couldn’t be any more specific than that because a lot of cutworm moths make pupae that look like this.
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On July 15, 2022, Sam and I went out to the front yard just at sunset. As we walked past the pear tree in the yard, we noticed that it was buzzing. Looking a bit closer, we saw that the tree was surrounded by dozens of insects about the size and color of a honey bee, hovering around the leaves without landing. At first we thought that maybe they were honey bees, and maybe one of our beehives was getting ready to swarm and was scouting out the tree first. But there were two problems with this: (1) honeybees don’t normally fly at dusk, and (2) while it was a bit dark and hard to see them clearly, they buzzed just a bit too loudly to be honey bees, and didn’t look quite right. So, I grabbed an insect net to snag one out of the air, and this was what we caught:
read more…Continuing with pictures from Sandy, Sam, and Rosie’s trip to the UK in June, Sam photographed this very striking moth in the Cotswolds on June 24, 2022. She says that when it spread its wings, the hindwings were bright red (although it wouldn’t show them long enough for her to get a picture).
read more…Sandy, Sam, and Rosie all went to the UK from June 18 to June 30, 2022 to walk the Cotswolds. Sandy’s D&D buddy, Ben Nikula[1], lives in London, so they stopped by to visit and he showed them around. While they were visiting the Shepperton Locks[2], they found this large black beetle, which they photographed with their cell phone cameras:
read more…Here’s an immature pillbug that I caught in my pitfall trap on April 13, 2022. It was very small, about the size of an uncooked grain of rice.
Our front door has a roofed-over area in front of it, with concrete pillars holding up the roof. And, right around the middle of May (2022), a robin decided that this would be a perfect place to build her nest. By the time we realized what she was up to, she had already laid some eggs, so we switched to going in and out of the house through the garage rather than spooking her every time we walked out the front door. Every now and then, she would take a break from sitting on her eggs, and Sandy managed to sneak in and get a picture of them while she wasn’t looking[1].
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