Sam found this for me in the yard somewhere on July 21, 2010[1]. It was a small green inchworm, only a bit over an inch long and very thin. The background in these photos is a kleenex, by the way.
In October of 2010, Sam and Rosie won a giant pumpkin in a raffle, which we carved and put out on Halloween. Afterwards, Sandy wheeled it out back to the edge of the woods for the deer to eat. Which they did over a period of several days, starting with ripping its face off:
We caught this beetle in the back yard on July 31, 2010. I can’t remember now whether we caught it with a sweep-net in the grass, or whether it was one of the ones that we collected by putting a tarp under a small tree and then whacking the tree with a stick. Both of which methods are very productive for collecting lots of insects, by the way. It is clearly a lady beetle, it has the standard lady beetle body shape and general coloration. Although it was a bit larger than the average lady beetle, probably twice the length of the standard little orange-with-black-spots types[1].
Sam found this small, brightly-colored beetle on a window screen on July 24, 2010. He was only about four millimeters long (the thing he is standing on is the lip of a plastic jar that is about 2 mm thick) but the red-orange coloration was fairly eye-catching.
When Sam caught this beetle in July of 2010, I just took the pictures for the sake of the practice, because I though that it was one that had already been photographed and posted on this site. But, on further examination, I see that aside from both being black beetles with yellow markings, they were not otherwise very similar. The other one had very thin, sharply curved yellow markings, while this one has broad yellow stripes, with the middle stripes joining to make a kind of “U” mark on each wing cover.
A special Easter bonus posting. Two postings in one weekend! Plus snow!
Early yesterday morning (Saturday, April 23, 2011), we had what I sincerely hope was our last serious snowfall of the season [1] . We got a couple of inches by about 7:30 AM, when I went outside to get the saturday newspaper.
Once outside, I noticed that there were a number of what looked like short twigs resting on top of the snow. Then I thought, “That’s odd – there’s no wind to break twigs off of trees, and it’s still snowing. Why would twigs be on top of the snow?” And looking closer, I realized that the answer was, “Because they aren’t twigs”.
They were, in fact, earthworms! Little earthworms, only a few millimeters in diameter and a couple of inches long, but earthworms nevertheless. What they were doing crawling around in the snow, I have no idea. They were certainly alive, too. When I picked one up, it curled up and contracted just like you expect a worm to do.
Wolf spiders are very common in our yard, and are particularly noticeable in the spring before the grass grows up. We found this very well-camouflaged one on May 6, 2010, carrying what looked like a little pebble attached to the end of her abdomen.
Sam caught this butterfly for me on May 16, 2010 with her insect net. Like most butterflies, it wasn’t very cooperative about showing the tops of its wings, but I did manage to snap one shot with the wings open.
Sandy and Sam were putting in a flower bed at the east end of the house at the end of the summer [1], and while digging it out they found this large, spiky thing. It was about an inch long, and pretty active, crawling along quite briskly and acting for all the world like a larva of some sort.
Michigan was not always the way it is now[1]. In fact, one could make the argument that Michigan has almost never been the way it is now, and will probably not be the way it is now for very long (geologically speaking[2]). This area has, at various times, been:
– buried under glaciers, or
– covered in lava flows, or
– seabottom/oceanic shoreline[3], or
– part of a relatively dry continental interior, or
– subjected to millions of years of conditions that are currently a mystery because the evidence of them has been scraped away by the glaciers[4].
One of the ways that Michigan was, is that much of it was partially submerged under a warm, shallow sea filled with coral and other life forms between about 514 and 306 million years ago[5]. Which, at the time, included a lot of these[6]:
This is your classic trilobite. They didn’t look exactly like this when they were alive, as they also had antennae and numerous legs (which aren’t normally preserved in the fossils). The mouth was on the underside, and isn’t visible here.