On June 20, 2018 we were just starting a vacation trip across the UP and Canada (as far as Montreal). When we stopped at a roadside park/rest area just outside of Newberry, Sam noticed some Forest Tent Caterpillars (Malacosoma disstria) crawling on the side of the restroom buildings.
We found this little brick-red jumping spider running around on our carpet on July 8, 2017. The thing next to him is a bendy drinking-straw, for scale – he was easily small enough to run down the inside of it if he had wanted to.
We found this little gray weevil crawling around on our wall on July 4, 2017. It was a little feller, maybe about 3 millimeters long.
The closest match I found on my own was the Cabbage Curculio, Ceutorhynchus rapae, which feeds on cabbages, mustards, broccoli, cauliflower, turnips, and other plants of such ilk. But, it turns out I was wrong.
The girls caught this blue-and-black damselfly for me on July 3, 2017. Normally, damselflies are flighty little things and hard to photograph, but this one hung around for a few shots, at least.
Judging from the lack of anything resembling claspers at the abdomen tip, I think this was probably a female (although I could be mistaken on that point).
I found these very small ants tending their grubs when I flipped over a rock on April 22, 2017. By very small, I mean the individual ants were only a couple of millimeters long, and were pushing the ability of my camera to resolve details.
We found this rather elongated, thin-legged true bug on July 19, 2017
Some of the distinctive features are the two spines projecting sideways from the middle of the thorax, the elongated head with a thin neck, and the pretty solid-looking piercing-sucking mouthparts.
The shagbark hickory, Carya ovata, is common in the southern part of Michigan, but normally they don’t grow up here in the UP. So, while the ones we planted on the back part of our property may not be the only ones in Houghton County, they are certainly the only ones that Sandy and I are aware of. Here is one, as of October 9, 2016. For scale, Sam standing next to it was almost exactly five feet tall at the time.
In addition to the club mosses that resembled cedar leaves that I posted last week, we also found a lot of these plants that looked like tiny little pine or spruce trees on November 5, 2016 at the Churning Rapids Ski Trails:
In November, after most of the flowering plants have died back due to frost (but before it really starts to snow), there are some other kinds of plants that become more visible. Like these low plants forming a sort of ground cover, that we found while walking around the Churning Rapids Ski Trail on November 5, 2016:
On June 15, 2016, we took a trip down to southern Michigan/northern Ohio, and one of the things we did was take the kids to Cedar Point. While we were there, they were having a fairly significant emergence of large mayflies. They weren’t numerous enough to be a really serious issue, but they were pretty much everywhere if you took a moment to look. Like on this poster for a face-painting booth:
