So, last time while talking about Baltimore Checkerspot butterflies, I mentioned that their caterpillars have taken a liking to English Plantain, a common invasive weed. How common is it? Well, it makes up a substantial fraction of our lawn, for one thing. Here is some that I photographed on July 2, 2016, right in their peak blooming period. The flower heads are the most noticeable, they shoot up to about 6 inches tall and look like this:
I found this spiky orange-and-black caterpillar crawling across the road on May 31, 2016. It was about an inch long, so not too huge as caterpillars go.
Those spikes are similar to what I’ve seen in several other butterflies, most notably the fritillaries and mourning cloaks, so I figured it was related to them.
During my walk in the woods on November 8, 2015, there were some late-season fungi growing out if the sides of pine logs. They were not too large, this one was only a couple of inches across (that’s a stalk of grass running across the top of the picture, if you’d like a sense of scale).
On June 19, 2016, after a night of camping in Traverse City, Sam told me that Rosie had found an interesting insect crawling on their tent on the mesh under the rain fly. “I think it’s a stick insect”, she said. And, she was right. It was a stick insect!
These were very plentiful at the east end of our lawn on May 26, 2016. The spot with the greatest number is a nutrient-poor area with shallow topsoil that floods during the spring melt, but then dries up to the point where it barely even supports grass.
On November 8, 2015, I was back in the pine plantation behind the house. The plantation was thinned a few years ago, and the loggers left a fair number of smaller trees that had been cut down, but that they didn’t then haul away for whatever reason. By this time, they had rotted enough that the bark was loosening, and with very little effort the bark could be peeled off entirely. And, for just about every tree that I checked, there was at least one of these beetles:
We found these wild roses on our trip to Lake of the Woods on June 14, 2015. They aren’t as big and fancy as domesticated roses, with blossoms only about 2 or 3 inches across when fully opened, but they are pretty enough.
This is the second specimen I photographed on November 8, 2015. Basically, I noticed that I had very few photographs for November-January, and wanted to run up the numbers a bit. So anyway, here is a crab spider that was hiding under the bark of a dead pine tree:
These ferns are very widespread in cool, moist, shady environments all around our property. This particular patch was photographed on May 27, 2016, and was growing beside the road, just down the hill from our house.
That’s “late” as in something I photographed very late in the season (November 8, 2015), not “late” as in “deceased”. It was in fact very much alive, although missing a leg, and therefore more inclined to sit still for photographs than one would expect for a grasshopper.
