These were caught in the pond in the woods on May 3, 2012. They were very active, fast-swimming beetles that tended to scoot around just under the surface.
I found this odd-looking bug crawling up the side of our house on May 18, 2012. It was about 6 mm long, unusually flat, and had very thick, distinctly-segmented antennae.
It looks to be one of the “Flat Bugs” in the family Aradidae. Most of the members of this family are in the genus Aradus, which contains about 84 North American species which mostly look very similar to this one.
We made another expedition to the pond in the woods behind the house on May 2, 2012[1], and caught some more interesting things. One of them was this spindly little specimen, that was standing on the bottom of the water in our tadpole pail. It was only a bit over a centimeter long, and so thin as to be practically impossible to see.
When I first saw it, it was standing fully submerged on the bottom of the pail, and seemed content that way, so I assumed that it was fully aquatic and left it there. But then by the next morning, when I was ready to photograph it, it acted as if it had died. After I had fished it out of the water and started photographing it, though, it started to twitch and then gradually sorted out its legs, acting as if it had some intention of getting up. So it looked like (a) it wasn’t actually aquatic, and needed to breathe air at least part of the time, but (b) it could evidently spend some non-trivial amount of time submerged if it had to.
There is a small wooded patch just behind our house that has a number of decaying chokecherry stumps. On April 19, 2012, we decided to tear apart one of the stumps that had practically turned to powder to see what (if anything) was living inside. And one of the things we found was this little beetle with bright-red wing covers.
When we we were back at the pond in the woods on April 22, 2012, Sandy spotted several of these skating over the surface of the water. Not only were they quick, but they could even briefly zip under water to escape if they were sufficiently alarmed. I finally caught one, though, and got it into a jar[1] to photograph.
There was a large funnel-shaped spider web under the eaves of our front porch through late summer of 2011, inhabited by a large female spider. And then, on September 10, we spotted this fellow sauntering jauntily onto the edges of the web.
Here’s a moth that came to our porch light on August 1, 2010. In reality it was pretty tiny, maybe half an inch long, but that doesn’t mean I can’t blow it up to monstrous dimensions for your viewing pleasure:
This moth was drawn to our porch light on August 1, 2010, and obligingly hung out on our house siding.
This looks to me like a Sparganothis Fruitworm moth, Sparganothis sulfureana. These have the right shape, are often that particular shade of yellow, and have that dark “X” pattern running across the backs of the wings.
When Sandy goes out ice-fishing, she likes to use “waxworms”, which all of the local bait shops carry. They are these creamy-white caterpillars, about 2 cm long. Here’s one in Sam’s hand, that was left over from a fishing trip on January 15, 2012:
Back around the end of September 2011, while I was at work, this moth flew into my office and died[1]. It was pretty large and striking, and I saw it come in. But, when I tried to catch it, it flew behind some bookshelves and I lost it. It wasn’t until some weeks later that I moved a stack of books, and found its dried-out corpse lying there by pure luck. So I brought it home to photograph.
