This is a fly that tried to bite me on the back of the head on July 20, 2011. She was about a centimeter long. Yes, I killed her. I’m not even a little bit sorry.
She’s a pretty typical deer fly, subfamily Chrysopsinae, except for one thing: most deer flies seem to have these crazily-colored iridescent eyes, while this one’s eyes are dark and featureless:
Sandy found this moth indoors, fluttering around the lights in the bathroom, on July 15, 2011. It was a pretty good-sized moth, with a body about 2 cm long (almost an inch).
While it was found in the house, it was our fault that it was inside. You see, Sam and Rosie like to play with Tent Caterpillars when they come out in the spring and summer, keeping them in jars and feeding them leaves. And there are a fair number of them that escape. Most of the escapees probably starve, but at least one of the Eastern Tent Caterpillars (Malacosoma americanum) evidently escaped, found a quiet corner to make a cocoon in, and then successfully pupated inside the house.
Here’s another of the little orange skippers that are common around here in the early summer (this one was photographed on June 16, 2011). It has some white mottling on its underwings, which is a bit different from the nearly pure orange skipper that was posted in the past.
This is another species (well, actually two species) that I’ve already posted before: on June 26, 2011, a cellar spider (Pholcus phalangioides) on our back porch eaves was wrapping up a Clover weevil (Sitona hispidulus) that it had caught for its next meal.
On July 2, 2011, I was upstairs early in the morning in our home office, writing something for this very blog. It was kind of hot inside at the time, so I had the window over the desk open. After a bit I glanced out the window, and happened to notice these on the window screen:
Here’s a small (body about 5 mm long) crane fly that came to our porch light on July 4, 2011. This one caught my eye because of its almost emerald green color, which is pretty unusual for a crane fly,
This white moth came to our porch light on July 4, 2011. Its wings look a bit ratty at the edges, so this was probably near the end of its life. Which suggests that the main flight period for this species was probably earlier, maybe most of the month of June.
On June 26, 2011 I turned over a concrete stepping-stone to see what was underneath. There were ants. The ones I saw first looked to be Pavement Ants, which are a species that has been here before. Here’s one trying to lug an ant cocoon to safety after I exposed their nest:
I caught this large jumping spider with a sweep-net in the back yard on July 3, 2011. She was pretty close to a centimeter long, which for a jumping spider around here is pretty huge.
She was also obviously full of eggs, which would be why her abdomen was bulging so much.
And here[1] we see the heartbreak of male-pattern baldness
Sam caught this rather nondescript moth for me on June 14, 2011. It was reasonably good-sized (about two centimeters long), but almost utterly lacking in anything I can use as identifying features. Here it is on Sam’s fingers, with its wings a bit spread: