A few years ago, Sandy planted Swamp Milkweed at a few strategic places around the house, primarily as food for Monarch Butterfly caterpillars, and the plants are mostly doing well. On September 25, 2016, Sam and Rosie told me that there were aphids all over some of them, and so I came out to have a look. And yes, the aphid infestation was pretty heavy:
We have a number of these medium-sized trees growing alongside of our road, and I photographed them on July 8, 2016.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen one much more than about 25 feet tall, or with a trunk much more than maybe six inches in diameter.
Silverfish are so rare around Houghton that I had actually come to think that they didn’t live in this area at all. Until Sam came home from school on October 25, 2016 with this specimen in a jar:
It seems that she’d been seeing it in her locker for some days, and had finally caught it when it was trying to devour her science book.
These plants are common in swampy areas around here, they stand about 3 to 4 feet tall and bloom through most of August. I photographed them on August 1, 2016.
The flowers grow in a loose cluster at the top of the stem, and consist of little purple cylinders with threadlike petals.
Rosie caught this weevil for me on September 19, 2016. Its body was about the size of a grain of wheat, and the snout was about as long as its entire body.
These low-growing plants with clusters of irregularly-blooming purple flowers are common in our backyard. I photographed them on July 19, 2016, but they seem to bloom for a pretty extended period that covers most of the summer.
The girls found this caterpillar somewhere in the yard on June 25, 2016. It was such a dark maroon color that it looked almost black, with a yellow stripe down each side and a velvety sheen to its skin.
These plants were growing in the ditch beside our road, and were photographed on July 5, 2016. At the time I took the pictures, I thought they were both the same species, but I’ve since found that they are different (but closely related) plants.
The first one is Curly Dock, Rumex crispus. This is a fairly tall plant, with this specimen standing something over three feet tall.
We found this large, handsome beetle under one of the “snake sheets”[1] on June 26, 2016.
The gold spots on the wing covers are quite pretty.
Sam, Rosie, and I were out walking in the woods on October 9, 2016, when Rosie spotted these two slugs, huddled together in a little slime-filled pit in the ground. She wanted to know what they were doing.
