We found this black-and-red ichneumon wasp hanging around our porch light on August 1, 2010. Here it is in long form so that you can see the whole thing:
She’s probably Cryptus albitarsis, the most common of the ichneumon wasps that have this particular coloration. And we can be sure this is a “she”, because the males don’t have those long ovipositors.
I found this unusually large jumping spider on one of the roof support pillars on our front porch on July 18, 2011. He was a big, black, furry, sinister-looking specimen, over a centimeter long.
Normally, jumping spiders are kind of cute, but this one has more the air of the insect murderer that he actually is.
When Sam caught this one in the yard on June 13, 2010, I thought it was going to be an easy ID. Pretty good-sized caterpillar, distinctive-looking striping; should be a piece of cake, right?
But, it turns out to be not so easy. I went all through Caterpillars of Eastern North America, searched BugGuide, posted it on BugGuide for ID, did Google searches on variations of “black caterpillar yellow orange stripes”, and even tried dropping the actual picture into the Google Reverse Image Search to find “similar” photographs[1]. Nothing. The pictures have been sitting on BugGuide since early October 2011, and nobody has even made so much as a guess yet, so it’s obviously a lot harder than I thought.
Sam found this lichen-covered rock with an inchworm on in on June 6, 2010. I’m pretty sure that the inchworm wasn’t eating the lichen, because the camouflage is all wrong.
It’s disguised as a twig, and the way it is posing, it would look pretty darned convincing if it were on a tree. But, being on a rock with a blue-gray lichen, it stands out like a sore thumb.
I found this fairly large moth (the body was about an inch long) hanging out on the ceiling of our garage, right over the spot where I park our truck. I collected it for photographs on November 22, 2011. But, it had actually been there for some time (maybe weeks) before I realized it was a moth and not just a smudge of dirt.
We just caught another one of these over the weekend, so it is probably time to post this.
On May 21, 2010 Sam and I found this hanging on the side of my father-in-law’s hunting blind in our back yard. I recognized it as a caterpillar that I’d originally posted way back in 2008, but hadn’t reared to adulthood to positively confirm what it was.
Sandy caught this on September 18, 2011 while sweep-netting in the grass on our septic drain field. It was about an inch long, not an unusual size for a caterpillar.
One thing that we noted right away, though, is that it wasn’t actually a caterpillar. If we count the prolegs on the abdomen, we see that there are eight pairs. If this were a butterfly or moth caterpillar, it would only have no more than five pairs of prolegs.
Sandy spotted these on September 10. They were on a Tag Alder bush beside the trail going to the back of our property.
I recognize these, because I’ve posted about them before. They are Wooly[1] Alder Aphids, Prociphilus tessellatus. And, these particular aphids were being tended and closely guarded by some good-sized ants (which were after the honeydew that the aphids secrete):
March 18, 2012 was an unusually warm day (the temperature was around 75F), so I went out with an insect net to see what could be found. And I found this little (about 5-6 mm long) black beetle swimming in a large puddle out back. The net wasn’t really designed as an aquatic net, but it worked well enough to catch the beetle and transfer it into a small jar of water. It preferred to float on the top of the water while careening crazily about like some demented motorboat, making it really hard to get a sharp photograph.
But, once out of the water it became comparatively subdued.
Sandy came back from grouse[1] hunting on October 23, 2011, and said that while she hadn’t seen any grouse, she had found a nice hornet’s nest in the woods to the northwest of the house. So, we all trooped back to find this huge hornets nest. There was no hornet activity, so I sawed off the branch it was attached to with my Leatherman[2], and brought it back to the house for pictures. That’s Sam holding it there, for scale.
