I don’t think these are house flies, but they do appear to be among their many relatives. And they are busily engaged in making more. Sam and Rosie found this couple near our front door on April 12, 2015, and when I came out to get pictures the flies hopped onto the back of my left hand and kept right on with what they were doing.
Sam caught this butterfly on June 29, 2014, and kept it in one of our mesh cages until I could come home to take pictures[1].
It is clearly one of the Greater Fritillaries, genus Speyeria, but it isn’t immediately obvious to me which one.
We were down at Agate Beach (at the northeast end of Misery Bay)[1] on June 14, 2015, when Rosie found this excellent scarab beetle crawling around on the stones.
It looks like a Goldsmith Beetle, Cotalpa lanigera, the only beetle like this that lives in the eastern US. You can click on this next picture to see it full-sized, if you like.
On May 19, 2015, Sandy was digging a post-hole for a decorative fence she was putting up while Sam watched. And then, Sam spotted this beetle that had fallen into the hole:
It was a pretty good-sized beetle, probably 5/8 inch long or so, and it had prominent ridges in its wing covers and red markings near the wing cover tips. It also didn’t smell very good.
We all went to the public beach at Dollar Bay on May 2, 2015, and while wading around in the shallows I spotted something floating close to the surface that looked a great deal like a dead leaf. Aside from the legs, that is. On closer examination, it turned out to be this enormous dragonfly nymph.
Sandy found this in the parking lot up by the hospital in Hancock on April 11, 2015. This was pretty early in the spring, we were still getting regular freezes. She says she was talking to somebody when she spotted it, and surreptitiously captured the beetle without ever interrupting the conversation. And I’m glad she grabbed it, because the last time I photographed one of these beetles, it was long dead and its legs were mostly broken off, so I really needed another specimen to photograph[1]
Sandy found this tiny beetle crawling on her computer keyboard on January 12, 2015. It was only about 2 mm long, if that.
It appears to be a Cigarette Beetle, Lasioderma serricorne.
White Tiger Moth – Either Fall Webworm or Virginian Tiger Moth
Sam and Rosie found this white moth upstairs on December 24, 2014. At first I thought it was the adult form of the fall webworm. While one doesn’t normally see these in December (the adults come out in the spring), I remembered that the girls had been keeping webworms as pets back in September, and perhaps one of them had escaped to pupate in the house. But then I remembered the yellow woollybear caterpillar that Sandy found last fall, and I realized that I didn’t remember what I did with it. Did I turn it loose, or did it get put in a jar to pupate?. And given that it is plausible for it to be either of those, which one is it?
Since December is one of the leanest months for finding insects to post, we decided to make a special effort to find this one on December 21, 2014. There are cattails growing in the swamp north of the house, and some of the seed-heads hang onto their “fluff” as an untidy mass through the winter. This retention of their fluff is because the seed-head is infested with these caterpillars, who bind the whole thing together with silk:
Last fall, Sandy shot a deer that had quite a nice set of antlers, good enough that she wanted to go ahead and mount it properly. It turns out that there is a taxidermist up in Calumet who prepares “European mounts”, which is a mount of just the skull and antlers, no skin. And in order to get the bones completely defleshed, without missing any little crevices, he has a big colony of dermestid beetles to do the job. And, he let me get some pictures. Here is a skull that they were working on at the time:
