So, on May 26, 2012, I got out our extension-cord “trouble light”, put in a daylight-spectrum fluorescent light, and set it up to shine on the broad, flat surface of the west side of our barn all night. May is a very mothy time of year for us, and we got a lot of moths, and in the next few weeks I’m going to be going through them in more or less the order I photographed them. Starting with this one:
We did another insect presentation at the Portage Lake Public Library on August 23, 2012, and to prepare for it we went out the previous evening with a sweep-net and a couple of insect cages to round up a bunch of random bugs from the tall grass. Caught a lot of stuff, too. Including several dozen of these predatory bugs:
Sandy likes to hunt. And the deer like to eat our fruit trees. So Sandy hunts the deer that come into our backyard, so that we can eat them. This past year, she shot one during archery season[1], on October 14, 2012. After helping her gut it and drag it out of the woods, I then obviously[2] had to check for deer-specific parasitic arthropods, so I went over the body with a nit-comb to see what would turn up. Kind of surprisingly, I didn’t find much[3], but several attempts finally turned up this:
Sam and Rosie caught this katydid for me on July 27, 2012. They found it in the garden on the south side of the house.
While I’ve had similar-looking katydids on a couple of occasions in the past, this is the first one that was a male.
I have posted pictures of beetles that are closely-related to this one (and maybe even the same species) twice before, but it is such a striking beetle that I just can’t resist photographing it again. This is one that landed on Sandy while she was doing the first lawn-mowing of the season on May 28, 2012.
No, the title isn’t just me listing punctuation marks for no reason. Those are the two possible common names I’m trying to decide between for this butterfly:
Sam netted it from our lilac bush on May 20, 2012. It’s in pretty rough shape, because this is one of the species that overwinters as an adult, and it has been an adult for 6-8 months (which is positively ancient for a butterfly). It’s definitely one of the anglewings in the genus Polygonia. Even though a lot of the wing edges have been broken off, and the colors are kind of faded, the pattern and wing shape is very distinctive.
Here are more insects that came to our garage light on May 19, 2012. This first picture is a three-fer:
I can’t really identify the narrow-winged one on the right beyond being another plume moth, and the tiny one in the upper left (which I actually didn’t even notice in the picture until just now) is probably one of the many species of leaf-mining micromoths. The big brown moth in the middle, though, is a good match for the Curved Tooth Geometer, alias the Purplish-Brown Looper[1], also known as Eutrapela clemataria. And if that’s in fact what it is, I’ve already posted pictures of the caterpillar of this species. The distinctive features are the nearly straight line running across the backs of the wings, the scalloped appearance of the wing trailing edges, and the white antennae combined with a white spot in the middle of the forehead.
Sometimes written as “Noseeums” to make it all one word. This is a good common name, because while you “feel-um” (they feel like a tiny itchy pinprick), you don’t “see-um”. Like this one on Sam’s arm:
The story was, Sandy was out in the yard on August 4, 2012 practicing building decorative stonework structures[1], and came in telling us that the no-see-ums were really bad in that particular spot. So Sam and I went out there and waited a bit for one of us to get a bite. Sam felt one first. I managed to get a couple of pictures, but then Sam said it itched too much and scratched it away. So, I waited until I got a bite, and tried to get pictures of that:
Back on March 23, 2012, I found this Frito corn chip on the floor at work, covered with a few dozen pavement ants. This was in about the same place as I had previously found an ant-covered snack chip, and the ants probably came from either the same nest or a daughter nest[1]. They are most likely the Immigrant Pavement Ants, Tetramorium immigrans
A scorpionfly walks into a bar, and the bartender says, “Hey, buddy, why the long face?”[1]
I found this lying dead on the side of the road on June 26, 2012, and immediately scooped it up to bring home. This is only the second scorpionfly I’ve ever seen, and the first one was years ago, before I started taking bug pictures.