This rather lumpy-looking moth with prominent white spots came to our porch light on August 1, 2016.
The tufts of fuzz on the shoulders and back are pretty good at breaking up the outline, and making it look more like a bark chip than a moth.
Some months ago, I posted some pictures of wild ferns that I had initially misidentified as bracken ferns. They weren’t.
These, that I photographed on August 1, 2016, are a different story, though. They are most definitely Bracken (and were growing just a few feet uphill from the not-bracken-ferns).
So, here we are. Ten years ago today I posted my first online insect pictures – a blurry fly, and a cecropia moth caterpillar:
This smallish reddish-brown moth was at our porch light on August 1, 2016.
It’s pretty clearly one of the Tortricids, a large family of small-to-medium-sized moths that generally have that particular round-shouldered appearance when at rest.
These grass-like plants grow in the wet ditches beside our road, and were setting seed on June 29, 2016.
The leaves are tougher and more fibrous than most of the local grasses, and the seedheads are on drooping stalks.
This moth was hanging around our porch light on August 8, 2016. It had a fairly striking pattern of wavy dark lines across a light gray background.
It also had quite feathery antennae (so was probably a male), and small, but distinctive, yellow-orange spots on top of his head and on each shoulder.
By June 26, 2016, a lot of the slow-moving water down at the Pilgrim River wildlife area had been covered by mats of duckweed, like this:
The mat is not continuous, it is made up of hundreds of thousands of tiny individual plants.
Sam brought me this beetle on August 9, 2016. I think she caught it around our front door, near the porch light. That dark and white coloration is the sort of thing you see when an insect camouflages itself to resemble a bird dropping.
These were photographed on July 5, 2016. They were growing in the ditch alongside our road, where the ground is consistently moist. The photo doesn’t fully do justice to the size of the plants, they were around four to five feet tall.
Sam caught this moth for me in the yard on July 24, 2016.
We’ve seen this one before, although last time the specimen was so badly tattered that it looked quite different. It is a Crocus Geometer, Xanthotype sospeta.