We were driving home from Canada on June 27, 2018, and stopped for a bit at Au Train Beach. This is one of the Lake Superior beaches between Munising and Marquette, and is a spot where the bay is capturing a nice bit of sand. This is somewhat atypical for Lake Superior, which is more known for its rocky beaches (the more southerly Great Lakes are the ones with a lot of sand beaches).
Here’s one last thing I wanted to include from our trip to Montreal on June 25, 2018. While driving to town, I was looking at the city map we had picked up at the tourist information center, and I noticed that there was a huge greenspace right in the middle of the city. We were wondering why, with the rest of the city so built up and property values presumably high, such a large area had been left as a park. Then, after getting to the hotel, Rosie and I went up to the 11th floor (which was where the pool was located), and I looked out of the windows.
Oh. That’s why . . .
When we visited the Montreal Botanical Gardens on June 25, 2018, we saw that it included an Insectarium[1]. So, of course, we had to go there, right?
Right. Here’s an aerial shot of the Insectarium that I grabbed from Google Maps. You may note that it is shaped like a stylized insect: the head and eyes are facing to the right, the reddish-brown part of the building is the body, and the white wings on either side are, well, the wings:
When we arrived in Montreal on June 25, 2018, we found out about the Montreal Botanical Gardens. We hadn’t been aware of this until we got into town, but this is possibly the most extensive botanical garden in North America. It was only about 20 minutes to get there from our hotel using the subway system, so of course we had to go.
The entrance is a park all by itself, with fountains and artificial streams.
Continuing with the plants at the Riverbend Campground on June 23, 2018, we saw significant areas covered by this low plant with a great profusion of yellow 5-petaled flowers.
These are definitely a variety of Sedum, and are most likely Biting Stonecrop, Sedum Acre.
Remember the bullfrog pictures from Canada that I took on June 23, 2018, and that I posted a few weeks ago? Well, here are the plants that the frogs were hiding in. These are rushes that grow on the riverbank, out to where the water is maybe a foot or so deep.
Cone-shaped terrestrial snail from Ontario
While we were at the Riverbend Campground on June 24, 2018, I was strolling around and spotted this little snail crawling along the edge of a leaf.
You can clearly see its eyestalks, including the dark optic nerve running up them. I understand that snail eyesight isn’t so hot, but they do have the advantage that the stalks allow them to peek around the edge of their shells.
On July 7, 2018, we decided to go up to Boston Pond to go canoeing. When we got there, Sandy happened to notice something unusual. It seems that some of the low bushes near the shore were covered in little blue damselflies. They are a bit hard to pick out, so I circled the ones I could distinguish in this picture.
As of about a week ago, I gained the ability to take thermal images [1]. This is has a lot of uses, but for our purposes it is excellent for detecting warm-blooded creatures in the dark. Oh, you know. Like the White-Lined Sphinx Moth that I posted a couple of weeks ago. It turns out that these moths were still coming around to the petunias in the evenings as of September 14, 2018. Here’s a video. The moth is the little bright orange spot that starts out a little below and to the left of center, then zooms around to the upper right before going back down to the left (I had to pan the camera around a lot to track it, and it was pretty fast, so I lost it a couple of times):
I’ve been kind of expecting these to turn up sooner or later. We were up at the Eagle Harbor Sands on July 28, 2018 when a friend showed me this brilliant green beetle that had landed on his arm.
While I hadn’t seen one before in the flesh, I don’t think that there is much doubt that this is an Emerald Ash Borer, Agrilus planipennis.