So, last week, the girls and I were getting ready to go out for a walk, when Rosie suddenly screamed and threw away her mitten. It seems that Sam had tried to put on the mitten first herself, felt something in it that “felt weird and creepy”, took it off, and then gave it to her sister to wear. At any rate, by this point neither of them wanted to touch the mitten any more, so when we got back from our walk I decided to see what was inside that was making Sam call it the “Evil Mitten”.
My hands are too big to reach into their mittens, so I decided to just turn it inside out. Sam had said it felt “crunchy, and scratchy, and squishy”, which wasn’t much help telling me what to expect. The first thing I saw was a lot of crumbs that looked like crushed chicken feed, so as the mitten inverted I was brushing this into a wastebasket. Then, I felt something that felt different. Like animal fur. And I saw this, sticking out of a hole in the mitten lining:
We all know that insects have antennae, but the question is, what are they for, exactly? They are clearly sense organs, but what do they sense? And why are they so wildly variable, ranging from tiny little threads, to great plumose things?
Every year around mid-June, we get periods where it appears to be snowing again, even though the temperature is around 70 F or so. Like this, on June 28, 2019[1]:
It even blows and drifts kind of like snow.
We have a lot of strawberry plants growing on our property, even though we never planted them. This blossoming specimen was photographed on June 3, 2019, and you can see how it is a low growing plant growing around the bases of plants that will ultimately become a lot taller.
Houghton is always so beautiful in mid-June, when the hibiscus bloom. Like this beautiful Chinese Hibiscus
. . . and if any of you checked that link before going further, you might be thinking “wait juuuuuuuuust a minute here. That’s a tropical plant! Are you seriously suggesting that you can grow those in Houghton, of all places?
Continuing with June 3, 2019, we found these yellow flowers just a little way down the trail from the Dog Violets I posted last week.
We were walking through the woods behind our house on June 3, 2019 when we found these tiny little wild violets. There is a power transmission line running through the woods, and these were growing in the treeless area under the power lines.
Sam and Rosie found this fairly large rove beetle crawling up the side of our house on June 7, 2019. It was about half an inch long.
It was also extremely fast, and unhappy about being exposed. My camera flash spooked it pretty badly. It scurried along rapidly, frequently waving its abdomen tip in the air in a threatening fashion, and then trying very hard to hide in whatever it percieved as being a crevice or shelter of any kind.
Even though our road was badly washed out in the Father’s Day Flood of 2018, not all of the plant life was utterly destroyed. For example, on June 5, 2019, I spotted this little flower on a little peninsula of road margin that had not been washed completely away.
Rosie caught this small red-and-black dragonfly for me with an insect net on June 18, 2019. We had it in a cage at first until it calmed down, but then it was willing to sit on my fingertips for quite a long time while I took pictures. Comparing it with my fingers, it looks to be about an inch and a half long.
