On the evening of June 11, 2016, I was driving our little pickup truck back home along Canal Road, and kind of casually noticed what looked like a rock beside the road. And as I passed it, suddenly realized, “Hey, that rock looked like it had a head! And a tail!” So, I immediately pulled over, ran back, and saw this fine individual getting ready to unintentionally commit suicide by trying to cross a busy road:
There are a number of species of small crane flies (about half an inch long) that are commonly found flying around even when the temperatures are barely above freezing. Here are some of them from November 5[1], 2015.
On patches of nutrient-poor soil where nothing much else grows, we have extensive areas of this very hardy “plant”. It is Reindeer Moss, Cladonia rangiferina, one of our most cold-hardy types of vegetation.
On December 12, 2015, we received a Christmas card with this charming little passenger riding on it:
Granted, December of 2015 was unusually warm, but still. It had been below freezing most of the time for a couple of weeks at that point. This is one cold-hardy spider, and they must be loaded with antifreeze to keep active at low temperatures like this.
This inchworm was out really late in the year, it was crawling on our house siding on November 4, 2015. This was well after our first frosts, which happened a couple of weeks earlier.
If it was going to overwinter as a pupa, I would have expected it to have made a cocoon already. So it was probably going to overwinter as a caterpillar. and was crawling on our house siding looking for something to shelter under.
In addition to the Common Horsetails, we also have quite a number of their close relatives, the Scouring Rushes. There are two species of scouring rushes growing alongside of our road: one with stems about the diameter of a pencil and that get almost 3 feet tall:
We took a day trip down to the Porcupine Mountains[1] to see the Lake of the Clouds on June 14, 2015, just to see what we could see. This is the view from the cliffs overlooking the lake, a few hundred feet up.
These plants grow in great profusion in and beside the little stream that flows alongside of the road that we live on. I photographed them on May 11, 2016, while they were still showing their two distinct types of shoots. The first part to come up are the brown-and-black spore-bearing shoots, which are up to about 6 inches tall. These pop up practically overnight, and have no leaves or chlorophyll.
Sam and Rosie caught this little frog in the yard on April 16, 2016.
Its body was under an inch long, so as far as size goes it wasn’t much bigger than some of our larger insects. From the coloration, and the dark “X” mark on its back, this is pretty clearly a Spring Peeper, Pseudacris crucifer.
In addition to the pines and balsam firs, the next most prominent conifers on and around our properties are the spruces. We have some big ones near the barn that I think were planted intentionally:
and smaller ones scattered around the property that came up from seed.