Well, I see I’ve been neglecting the myriapods again, so here’s a millipede that Sam found back in 2008, on May 10. It was under a rock next to the house, and it is fairly small (only about 14 mm long).
We have a number of aspen trees growing around our yard, and this summer they were heavily infested with a type of “leaf miner”. These are insect larvae that tunnel in between the top and bottom membranes of plant leaves, and just eat out the green, nutritious part in the middle. The leaf damage that these caused looked like this:
In the past, our tick season had almost exclusively been April-June, with the primary tick species being the Wood Tick, Dermacentor variabilis. But then, on October 30 of 2010, Sandy was petting the dog and found this:
I’m afraid this one isn’t very “Christmassy”. Sorry about that.
On June 15, Sandy’s parents came up to visit us (and particularly to see their granddaughters). This was a long trip, it’s roughly 570 miles from their house to here. And somewhere along the way, their radiator grille intercepted this butterfly that Sandy and Sam found still stuck there. The body was . . . well, never mind the body, but I was able to reconstruct the wings pretty much.
We were walking in the woods out back on July 23, and as usual we were casually checking over any milkweed we passed to see if there were any Monarch caterpillars on them. By this time, the Monarch season was tapering off, so we weren’t finding too many of them. But, we did find this caterpillar clinging to a milkweed stalk:
We were all walking on the trails in the woods behind the Copper Country Humane Society in September when Sam saw this hanging from a leaf on a small oak tree:
And now, for our 200th installment, we visit these ladies that we’ve seen before. They are Northern Paper Wasps, Polistes fuscatus. But this time, there was a nest built in the eaves of our house that was in a very convenient spot for photographing. So, let’s have a look at the nest:
In the backyard near the strawberry patch, we have a free-standing iron plant-hanger. A tiny little yellow orb-weaver spider used it as a support for a tiny little orb web, about two inches across:
I expect it was a recently-hatched spider, with a body maybe one or two millimeters long. These pictures show the virtues of an orb web. First of all, it uses a bare minimum of silk to cover an area much bigger than the spider, and she can dash quickly to any part of it when a prey item hits it. Second, the spiral strands are sticky (so that little midges that hit them will adhere), while the straight strands running out from the center are not (so that the spider can run along them without getting stuck herself). And third, it can be really hard to see. That first picture was angled so that the light would reflect off of it, but if we change the angle just a little, it is a case of now you see it, and now you don’t:
Back when we were crayfish-hunting in the middle of May, we also caught this by accident while turning over stones looking for crayfish:
On October 31, we suddenly noticed what looked like a very large bumblebee buzzing around the house[1].
It certainly acted like a bee, it was strongly attracted to sweets in any case. Once it settled down[2], we could get a better look at it and determined that it was a young female[3]. But, it was not in fact a bee, but instead some other species mimicking a bee.