When we first moved to our current property a bit over 20 years ago, there was a fairly large swamp/shallow pond in the woods out back. This was a beaver pond, and it was a rich source of frogs, aquatic insects, leeches, turtles, and other such creatures. Something happened to the original set of beavers, though, and over time their dam fell into disrepair and the pond gradually drained away. As of last year, it had pretty much reverted to a simple creek about 3 or 4 feet wide.
read more…For a while now, we’d been seeing these extremely tiny flying insects in the house, particularly near the kitchen sink. They were about the size of this comma (,) and so light-colored that they looked white. They were hard to make out, but they appeared to be kind of a “T” shape, with wings sticking out to the side and the abdomen hanging down while they hovered. It wasn’t possible to photograph them in the air. So on May 28, 2022, I got a piece of packing tape and gently waved it towards one of them until it touched the tape and got stuck. And here it is:
read more…Hairy Elongated Springtails from Pit Trap
I had left a “pit trap” [1] out for a few days, and when I looked inside it on May 7, 2022 it was pretty much seething with springtails. You can se several of them in this next picture. Each of them was approximately the size of the commas in the preceding line of text. The stuff that looks like giant rocks, is soil and grains of fine sand. I think I see eleven springtails in there.
read more…I found this trying to cross the road just downhill from our house on May 4, 2022. It was just about an inch long, and would have been too long to fit in the full field of view of my macro lens if it hadn’t partially curled up for this shot.
read more…I was going through some old pictures, and found these from June 27, 2020. This is a bird nest that was built on the wall of the front porch of the old house.
I came home from work on Monday, April 11, 2022, and found nobody home except the cats. And a large note on the table saying, “There is a worm beside the sink. It is from the cat (Saffron). We are grossed out. We went to Tractor Supply[1]” And, in a plastic bag full of water by the sink, I found this big roundworm.
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