I didn’t even know we had star-nosed moles up here
On July 14, 2021, I found this small mammal that had just died at the side of our road. It did not look damaged at all, so it wasn’t killed by traffic. I think it probably drowned and washed down the side of the road in the rainstorm we had the previous night.
The Marsin Nature Retreat is just a few miles down the road from us, and has a nice set of walking trails, so we went down there on July 5, 2021. And once there, we found that they were in the midst of the eighth plague – locusts. Here is a short video of Rosie running down the trail, and the little white objects fluttering up at her feet are the grasshoppers she was flushing up.
The pine plantation behind our house was thinned about a decade ago, which opened up the woods enough that light could reach the ground. This made the formerly-nearly-barren ground under the pines suddenly become an attractive environment for a variety of plants. As a result, there have been several waves of plant colonization, first the mulleins, then the daisies, then the raspberries/blackberries. The most recent arrival has been carpets of thin plants that grow about 2-3 feet tall, and have masses of tiny white blossomes, like these that we photographed on June 27, 2021:
Sam was looking at one of our maple trees on May 29, 2021, and noticed that there were glittery patches on many of the leaves. Some of the patches were pink,
and some were white.
I had been wanting a Canon MP-E 65mm F/2.8 1-5X Macro lens for a long time now, but put off buying one because it’s a $1000+ lens. But, while my trusty old 1:1 macro lens gave excellent service for many years, I’ve mostly photographed the bugs that were big enough for it to image clearly. And, in the last year, MP-Es have started showing up used on KEH.com, at a substantially lower price. So, in November 2020, I finally got one. And now, I can start photographing the tiny insects at a good resolution. Like this little green midge that I photographed on May 18, 2021:
During the first couple of weeks of June, I kept seeing these good-sized insects (nearly an inch long) fluttering along over the road that we live on. And on June 15, 2021, I finally caught one. Well, not “caught”, exactly. OK, it had landed on the road and died, so all I had to do was pick it up. Anyway, here it is:
Here’s a small brown moth that was at our porch light on June 25, 2019.
It looks like a Tortricid moth. This is a large family of smallish moths that mostly seem to have caterpillars that are “leaf-rollers”, rolling themselves up in a leaf like a burrito so that they will be protected while they eat it.
This is a bit of a break from plants and animals. Instead, we will be looking at an odd, unidentified structure my family and I stumbled across while out for a walk on May 23, 2021. At the bottom of the hill we live on, there is a trail that was formerly a railroad, but the tracks have been taken up and it was converted to a snowmobile/ATV trail. At the point where the trail crosses our road, there are concrete pylons that used to hold up a railroad bridge that crossed the creek valley.
I was on an expedition to find the remains of two former manganese mines[1] on May 20, 2021. And while driving down a dirt road near Alberta, I passed several patches of these very attractive and distinctive white flowers.
This sawfly came to our porch light on June 9, 2020.
Sawflies are broadly related to wasps, but they don’t have stingers. Their caterpillars generally eat leaves the way moth caterpillars do, and the adults generally look like this with fairly stocky bodies and kind of wasp-like heads.