I photographed these purple flowers on alongside the road leading uphill to our house on July 28, 2016, although we can find them pretty much all summer.
There appear to be two distinct populations of this plant along the road. Down at the bottom of the hill, the plants have good-sized blossoms and fairly broad, unbranched leaves:
On November 3, 2016, Sandy spotted this wasp on the window of our local grocery store. All she had to take its picture with was a cellphone, but she got a couple of pretty good pictures regardless:
This is really late in the season for us to be seeing any type of insect. This particular one looks like a wasp in the subfamily Ichneumoninae, which includes a number of species of black wasps with white markings in the middle of their antennae.
These white flowers were growing intermixed with several other wetland plants along the Pilgrim River boardwalk on June 26, 2016.
The flowers are white with 5 petals, and a greenish center with yellow anthers to carry the pollen.
Sam and Rosie caught this dark, metallic blue beetle for me on June 25, 2016.
This next picture includes my fingertip as a size reference. This is a fairly typical-size beetle, with a body about half an inch long.
So, on May 26, 2016, we got a phone call from some friends of ours asking if we’d like to come over to see some salamanders. Well, of course we would, so we went over to their place. “Where are they?” we asked.
“In the basement”.
“Oh, you have them in a container down there?”
“No, they are coming into the basement on their own!”
This small brown moth (a bit bigger than my fingernail) came to our porch light on June 25, 2016.
The way that it holds its abdomen tip curled to point straight up makes me think that it was spreading scent to attract a mate, which in turn suggests that it is a female[1].
This vine was growing across the boardwalk at the Pilgrim River Preserve on June 6, 2016.
It had fairly distinctive leaves, with two elongated lobes at the base.
Sandy was petting the dog on June 27, 2016, and felt a tiny object on the dog’s skin that didn’t feel quite like part of the dog. So, she got our Tick Twister tool, and pulled off the object. Which turned out to have legs.
Our second flower found beside the Pilgrim River on June 26, 2016 is this odd-looking specimen:
It almost doesn’t look like a flower. The maroon petals[1] are kind of rough and husk-like, and the center almost looks as if the fruit had already been picked. But, it was clearly producing pollen, and it was early enough in the season that we can be pretty sure it didn’t have time to get beyond the blooming stage. The flowers weren’t too large, as you can see by comparing them with my fingers.
Black and White Spotted Moth with Orange Shoulders – Small Magpie
This attractive little moth was hanging around our front door on the morning of July 3, 2016.
From the rear, we can also see that the abdomen tip is orange, and it has the little fringe of hairs along the wing edge that we’ve seen in a lot of other moths.