Sandy and Sam presented me with these fine morel specimens on May 26, 2019. They found them under some of the feral apple trees north of the house.
According to the pamphlet “May is Morel Month in Michigan” (MSU Cooperative Extension Service)[1], these appear to be the dark variety of Morchella angusticeps, which is the most common variety of morel here in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. As you can see by comparing one with the size of my hand, these are around 3-4 inches long, definitely big enough to be worth picking.
This spider caught a fly near our kitchen sink (behind some potted plants) on December 27, 2018.
Neither of these is a new species for this site (the spider is a Cellar Spider, Pholcus phalangioides, and the fly looks like a Cluster fly, genus Pollenia). But, I haven’t shown one being eaten by the other before.
So, on Monday, June 3, 2019, I was just coming out of Swift’s Hardware downtown when I heard a duck quacking loudly somewhere nearby. So I looked around, and across the street I saw the two people who had come out of the hardware store just before me, watching a female mallard duck standing there making a fuss. So I crossed the street to see what was going on. By the time I got across the road, the reason for her fussing had appeared: her ducklings had caught up with her.
When I spotted this moth on the wall of the building I work in on May 24, 2019, I unfortunately only had my cellphone camera available. And since it was about the size of my thumbnail, the pictures didn’t come out quite as sharp as I would have liked. But anyway, here it is:
While I was pushing my bike up the hill on May 13, 2019, I almost stepped on this good sized black beetle. So I popped him in a plastic box and brought him home for pictures.
He was kind of a handsome beetle, black with brassy iridescent highlights, and large, glossy mandibles.
Sandy and I were walking in the pine woods behind the house on May 17, 2019 when we saw a number of these kind of lumpy, fungal masses:
They were pretty big and substantial, as you can see comparing this one to Sandy’s hand.
Here is one of the reasons why I haven’t been posting bug or plant pictures lately. As of May 1, 2019[1], it looked like this outside:
While that melted within a couple of days, it never really got warm. And as of today, (May 9), it looks like this:
Ok, I just got back from snowshoeing in the woods today (April 7, 2019). The snow is still pretty deep [1], so it will be a while before I get much in the way of new critters or plants to photograph. But, the upper layer of snow has melted away to expose what is underneath. And much of what is underneath, is animal droppings.
These, for example, appear to be from a grouse.
On December 4, 2018, Dale took us to the Zuhl Museum at New Mexico State University. The Zuhls were dealers in mineral specimens, particularly petrified wood and other fossils, and they donated their extensive collection to NMSU in 2003.
The first thing you see at the museum is this giant petrified sequoia log outside the front entrance. Petrified wood figures heavily throughout the whole museum.
The Organ Pipe Mountains are just outside of Las Cruces, and Dale took us up there on December 2, 2018.
We didn’t get up into the mountains proper, but we did spend some time hiking around in the foothills. While doing this, we found this good-sized spider (her legspan was probably about the diameter of a quarter):