Today, instead of insects or plants, we have – a bucket of snakes!
The girls found these on July 8, 2015. They aren’t actually that big, the largest was only about 6 inches long. They are about the size of the really big “nightcrawler” earthworms.
Back in June of 2015, we went to the local cricket dealer to get crickets to feed to our tarantulas. Now, just selling crickets is no way to make a living, the demand just isn’t there, so she was also selling a variety of other things for people to feed to their carnivorous pets. One of those items that caught Sam and Rosie’s eyes were these Superworms (Zophobas morio), which are really big beetle larvae. As you can see by comparing this one with the ruler, it is well over an inch long.
Here’s a tree that may well be easier to identify in the winter (when it has no leaves) than in the summer. It is Paper Birch, Betula papyrifera, which is one of Northern Michigan’s signature trees.
This moth came to our porch light right at the end of our moth season, on November 5, 2015. It is a fairly uniform pale brown, almost blonde.
The thing is, we have very few local moth species that are both this size and that also fly as late as November, and this moth doesn’t quite look like any of them.
There are clumps of these shrubs all over our property. They are alders, genus Alnus, which are moderately closely related to birch. Ours only get about ten feet tall.
I’ve put off posting this tortricid moth from May 18, 2015 because I wasn’t sure that I’d be able to narrow it down very far. It has one of the common Tortricidae body shapes, but this is a very speciose family, and the lack of distinct color features was not very promising. Incidentally, it looks kind of blurry in this picture, not because it was out of focus, but because it actually looks blurry in real life.
This tall tree with a symmetrical top is a good landmark in our back yard, as it stands right in the middle where it is clearly visible from all the places that are out of sight of the house. It stands probably 35 feet tall, and has no other similar trees close to it. I took this picture on March 12, 2016, but being an evergreen conifer it looks pretty much the same all year.
Sandy found this tiny beetle on an orange in our kitchen on October 29, 2015. It was so small that it was actually getting kind of hard to see. We don’t know if it is a local species that got into the house, or an “exotic” that got carried all the way to us from wherever the oranges were grown. This possibility really opens things up, because there are probably more beetle species on any given square mile of Florida orange grove than there are in the entire Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Red pines, like this one, are the dominant trees in the back part of our property.
The reason that they are dominant, is that right behind our property is a couple of square miles of land that is mostly covered with a pine plantation, and this is the species of pine that the owners planted. The land west of our property currently looks like this:
This moth was at the light on August 4, 2015. Again, its general appearance screams “some kind of cutworm or dart moth”.
After searching, I found something that has pretty much exactly the same pattern, although mine’s patterning is not as clear and distinct. It looks like a somewhat faded Subgothic Dart Moth, Feltia subgothica.