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,
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:
