There are some little balsam poplar[1] saplings about 2-3 feet tall growing beside the road leading up the hill to our house. On July 26, 2012 I noticed that pretty much every leaf on them had one of these little white cocoons firmly stuck to its upper surface. The cocoons were about a quarter inch long, and bright white.
I found this crawling on my computer on May 26, 2012
It wasn’t very big, as you can see from this picture of it standing on the tip of a ball-point pen. In fact, it was so thin and spectral that it was practically invisible to the naked eye.
I was collecting some plum leaves on July 26, 2012 to feed the cecropia caterpillars[1], and found[2] this rolled-up leaf with a little spider inside guarding her egg sac.
She was white with a pale yellow abdomen, and on the underside of her abdomen there is a black stripe (which we can just barely make out here, through the webbing that she used to tie the leaf closed).
I found this still-winged queen ant crossing the road on July 26, 2012.
Since she was quite a scurrier, I refrigerated her for a bit for photographs of her underside. She looks dead in the next couple of pictures, but she actually wasn’t – she woke right back up once she warmed up again.
Rosie caught this grasshopper for me just outside our back door on July 16, 2012[1].
One obvious feature is the complete lack of wings. I thought at first that this was the nymph of a grasshopper that would have wings as an adult, but even grasshopper nymphs at least have some indication that they are going to have wings someday.
On July 13, 2012, Sandy found this caterpillar crawling on one of Sam’s dresses that had fallen off of the clothesline and laid on the grass for a while.
This is clearly a sphinx moth caterpillar, it has the characteristic single horn on the rump. But, I had trouble figuring out which one, because I couldn’t find anything that was green with a light-purple back like that.
I found this blue wasp crawling on a window on July 5, 2012. It was pretty active, so I put it in the refrigerator so I could photograph it without its flying away. And, as it turns out, instead of just slowing down, it died. On the plus side, it died with its wings fully spread so we can see everything.
On July 3, 2012, I found this huge sphinx moth hanging out on the wall of the building I work in. So I got a box from my office, caught it inside along with a wadded-up piece of paper to give it something to perch on, and took it home for pictures. For a size reference, the circular object under the tip of its left wing is a quarter coin
Here’s a big beetle of a species that I posted before, way back in 2008. I think the pictures are a bit sharper and show more detail this time, though.
It’s a Hermit Beetle, Osmoderma eremicola. I found it while I was at work on July 3, 2012. It was on a wall, plowing through a spider’s web as if it wasn’t there. This is the species with smooth wing covers, not the other closely-related species with the rough wing covers.
We netted this medium-sized dragonfly near the swampy pond in the woods on July 3, 2012. He was still flying, even though one of his hindwings had been almost destroyed in some earlier accident, and two other wings had some serious damage.
