June 26, 2016 was a beautiful day, so we took the kids and Granny down to the Nara Nature Trail, which runs alongside the wetlands at the mouth of the Pilgrim River, just east of town[1]. The first photo-worthy plant[2] that we saw was this clump of blue irises:
We were up at an annual gathering with friends on the old stamp sands near Eagle Harbor on July 30, 2016, where I was informed that a large spider had been spotted. This spider, in fact:
I unfortunately didn’t get a good size reference in the picture, but if I had gotten it into my hand, I think the legs would have stretched most of the width of my palm. And, it was a fairly uniform creamy-white color, which is unusual in a spider.
While biking to work on July 27, 2016, I spotted these vibrantly purple flowers growing beside the ditch alongside the road:
While it is a rather pretty flower, I would like to call your attention to one alarming fact: It is growing in immediate competition with Tansy, one of our most aggressively invasive species. And it is thriving.
Sam and Rosie spotted this beetle on the wall of our front hallway on May 7, 2016. It’s a Scarlet Malachite Beetle, Malachius aeneus.
I didn’t originally plan to post this species again, seeing as how I have shown it on this site three times before, but come on, it was right there, practically posing for me.
On August 27, 2016, Sandy came back from a walk down the hill, and told us that she’d found a ripe giant puffball in the woods. So, the girls and I went down and retrieved it. Here it is:
This is basically a giant spore-bag. The interior is just a massive ball of dust.
While I was bicycling home on June 20, 2016, I saw this large and excellent spider hanging out on the handlebars. It liked to rest with its legs stretched out in a line, which on a plant stalk or tree trunk would have made it really hard to spot.
On May 8, 2016, Sandy and the girls went back to the swamp in the woods to see what they could catch. They caught this:
It’s an Eastern Newt[1], Notophthalmus viridescens. This one also has a “friend”, I think that’s a mayfly nymph on its head. Newts eat insects (among other small creatures), so this may be more a case of the nymph hiding in the one place where the newt can’t get at it to eat it. The old problem of once you start riding a tiger, how do you get off?
Sam found this on a windowsill on June 11, 2016. It was a little fellow, the body was not much more than an eighth of an inch, and even with the long legs I think it would have sat on a penny with plenty of room to spare.
These plants are one of the signature species in the area, and figure heavily in the tourist trade – Thimbleberries, Rubus parviflorus. They are primarily a cool-weather western species, growing along the west coast at increasingly higher altitudes as one moves south. They mostly don’t grow east of the Rockies, but somehow we ended up with a disconnected population along the southern and western shores of Lake Superior[1]. They grow quite lushly, particularly on the north side of roads, alongside woodland trails, and at the edge of wooded areas. Here’s a patch on June 13, 2016, right at the height of their blooming season:
On June 7, 2016, Sam found this between the brick pavers that make up our front porch. It was about half an inch long (roughly the same size as an earwig).
Its most distinctive feature was the yellow tail. At first I thought it might be a female firefly, because some fireflies have wingless females, and the tail tip was sometimes dark,