It was a nice, sunny day on March 12, 2016, so I strapped on my snowshoes and went out to take pictures of trees. This first one is one of several white pines (Pinus strobus) that we have growing around the place. None of ours are particulary large, because up until about 50 years ago our property was mostly potato fields, but white pines can get really huge given sufficient time. They are apparently the tallest native tree in eastern North America, and it is claimed that some of the original old-growth White Pines were over 200 feet tall.
I was in Phoenix, Arizona the week of February 21, 2016 for a technical conference, and found these interesting arthropods just outside the convention center
The first one I saw was this stick insect, that has interesting shoes. Very stylish.
Sandy found several of these quarter-inch beetles living in the cage that she keeps crickets in to feed the tarantulas. This particular specimen was from October 31, 2015, but we found them from time to time through February as well.
I photographed this clump of intensely green (almost fluorescent) moss in the stream beside our road on June 15, 2015. It was not immersed in the water, but was growing on a little gravel island in the middle of the stream. The clump was about the size of the palm of my hand.
Here’s yet another moth from our porch light on May 18, 2015. All my pictures of it turned out to be from the same angle, but this one does seem to show pretty much all the details one would reasonably expect to be able to see in a picture. Especially considering that the actual moth had a total wingspan of around 3/4 inch, and so (depending on how big your screen is) this picture is pretty close to 20 times actual size.
Here’s another plant that was growing in the woods adjacent to the Lake Superior beach on July 12, 2015. The radial arrangement of leaves and the four-petaled “flower” is distinctive – it is Bunchberry, Cornus canadensis
This moth that came to the porch light on June 26, 2015 just has that general build and coloration that says to me, “Hi, I’m the adult form of some kind of cutworm!” Ah, but which one? That’s the question.
We found these plants with five-petaled white blossoms and glossy leaves on July 12, 2015, while we were driving along the beaches on the east side of the Keeweenaw Peninsula. They were some of the plants growing in the margin right next to the sandy beach.
So, last Wednesday I posted a species of pale green moths that came to the porch light on June 15, 2015. Here is the other species of green moths that came on the same night. These were about half the size, and greener.
These little purple daisy-like flowers bloom from late summer to right through the first hard freezes in October and November (the photos are from August 19, 2015).
There are all stages of blossoms shown here. The yellow-centered ones look like new blooms, the purple-centered ones look older, and the dried up ones are the ones going to seed.