Brennah's Backyard

Clearwing Moths

A couple of unusual and interesting moths in my area are the closely related hummingbird and snowberry clearwing moths. Both fly during the daytime, and hover in front of flowers they visit in a way that resembles a hummingbird sipping nectar. They also (as their name implies) both have large clear patches on their wings.

When I first spotted one of these moths (years ago now) I identified it as a snowberry clearwing. After that I began to assume all the large, clear winged moths I saw were the snowberry clearwing, but recently, going through and trying to identify various things I’d photographed, I realized I couldn’t remember what the difference between the two species was. I looked them up again, and realized that I’ve actually seen and photographed both (and there are actually a couple more less common species I haven’t seen).

The most obvious difference between the two species is that the snowberry clearwing has a black stripe running through the white patch on the head and ‘chest’ that meets the front pair of legs, which are also black, while on the hummingbird clearwing that patch and the front pair of legs are all consistently white. There are some subtle differences in the wings of the two species, but otherwise, both show a fair amount of variety in their colors and markings.

Though I think I’ve seen the snowberry clearwing most often, the best pictures I’ve gotten yet are of the hummingbird clearwing. But whichever species they are, they’re always beautiful and fun to see.

Hummingbird clearwing foraging on bee balm

Snowberry clearwing on oregano flowers. This is one of my older photos but it shows the stripe quite well.

Spring Ephemeral Series #5

Hairy Solomon’s seal

Solomon’s seals’ most obvious difference from the false Solomon’s seals (maianthemums) is that their flowers hang from the central stem instead of growing from the tip of the stem. I’ve found these sprinkled around the woods, but they definitely don’t grow in thick patches like some of the other wildflowers.

Solomon’s seal flowers with wild geraniums in the background.

Last spring I noticed that the leaves look quite interesting when they’re unfurling, which actually made them stand out even more from the maianthemums for me.

Mysterious Tiny Holes

I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to all the tiny holes in the sand around the seasonal pond area until little flickers of movement inside the holes caught my attention. (For some sense of scale in the photo, what looks like little pebbles are grains of sand.) They were only ever in my peripheral vision; whatever creature I was seeing was apparently very fast and skittish.

Unable to see properly what kept darting back into the holes, I eventually resorted to crouching over ones I’d seen recent movement in with my camera and holding very still… and waiting. I had to have my camera focused on the spot they would emerge before they came out as any tiny movement would cause them to disappear. After a bit of patience (and physical discomfort) I managed to get a couple clear shots of the heads of the creatures poking out of the hole… but they didn’t look like anything I recognized.

I thought they might be the immature form of some insect, but it took me quite a bit of searching before I managed to find something that looked similar… a tiger beetle larva! I don’t know how to tell what species of tiger beetle just from the head of the larvae, but it is quite likely that these were bronzed tiger beetle larvae, because I’d seen quite a few adults of that species in the same spot earlier that spring.

The other interesting thing about looking up pictures of the larvae was that I realized that it was just the head and thorax that is so well developed at this stage, and the rest of the body looks more grub-like. I had thought, looking at them in my pictures, that they looked like little ambush predators with those large mandibles (added to the fact that they didn’t ever seem to come all the way out of their burrows), and it turns out that’s exactly what they are. They pop out and grab passing insects (or other small animals), which is also why their front end is so much more developed at that stage. (The adults are predators too, but they chase down their prey.)

‘Very fast and skittish’ is also a pretty good description of adult tiger beetles, and this is usually the easiest angle to get of them… but I actually like how well it shows off the beetle’s markings!

Spring Ephemeral Series #4

Solomon’s Plume

Maianthemum racemosum aka solomon’s plume is larger and has larger flower clusters than starry false solomon’s seal, but it doesn’t spread as vigorously, so I don’t find it in such dense patches. I find this species particularly fun to photograph, and the flowers aren’t even the main draw for me. I do have one particular photo of the flowers that is one of my favorites, though:

The out of focus leaves in the background are of a different plant of the same species, which is part of what I like about the photo. The first photo I used is also an old favorite of mine, showing the developing flower cluster with wild geraniums in the background. But a lot of the pictures I’ve taken are of the leaves, which have much the same alternating, zigzagging pattern as their relatives, but with an extra wavy edge to the leaves.

It usually blooms slightly out of sync with the other ephemerals, and only has a cluster of buds when the others are at their peak. I still like seeing it mixed in with the wild geraniums, though.

It also has a distinctive speckled pattern on the underripe berries, which it shares with a few other maianthemum species, but is otherwise unique as far as I know. And because they have particularly large flower clusters, they also have larger clusters of berries.

I rarely see the berries fully ripe, so I’m sure they are appreciated by the woodland creatures as well.

A Walk Along the Au Sable River

Last summer I got to go on a pretty cool hike up north along the Au Sable river. The trail we stopped at turned out to have a lookout area up on the hillside above the river, and I quickly spotted a little island out in the river.

Also at the trailhead was Iargo Springs, which had its own special boardwalk leading down the hill to it. (When we looked it up before going we misread it as Largo Springs.) The springs were flowing out of the hillside into the river and were providing consistent moisture for a lot of different species of mosses and liverworts. There were too many other people around for me to get pictures of the springs themselves (hopefully I can go back sometime when it’s less crowded) but I did get a few pictures of some of the mosses:

I was fairly surprised to spot some sphagnum moss (aka peat moss) growing near the river. This was the first time I’d seen any in the wild (at least since learning anything about mosses). I’d always thought sphagnum mosses were particularly distinctive looking mosses, and it turns out that is presumably because they are a group of mosses with no close relatives (there are a couple of semi closely related species, but otherwise they’re pretty much off on their own branch of the moss family tree).

Unfortunately I didn’t get the best photos, but this was another one that surprised me; I didn’t think neckera moss was found this far south in Michigan, but this might have been close to the edge of its range for Michigan. There was not a lot there, just a small tuft on a tree.

This probably looks like a moss, but it is actually a type of liverwort (probably handsome woolywort). Liverworts are non-vascular plants like mosses but are considered their own group. Some of them look relatively different from mosses (thalloid liverworts), but a lot of them I would probably just assume to be mosses if I didn’t happen to recognize them. A lot of the differences between mosses and liverworts are fairly technical and it may be easier to just recognize a lot of them individually.

This is likely pincushion moss (or a close relative).

There were a few cedars just growing out in the river in shallower spots (I’m assuming anyway), which I thought was interesting. And these ducks were enjoying having some cedar stumps in the river to rest on:

The Au Sable River is far enough north of where I live that the overall ecosystem is very different, so most of the plants I saw were not things I’ve seen much or at all. Some of them I recognized anyway from hearing about them and being intrigued, but some I didn’t recognize at all.

This sweetfern is a good example of a plant with very different habitat requirements than the habitat I live in. I saw quite a bit of it, especially in the higher sandier areas of the trail. It likes dry sandy soils and tends to grow in pine forests. It was quite easy to identify since it has no particularly close relatives (also it isn’t actually a fern, despite the name).

Bracken ferns are super common in mid and northern Michigan generally (these I’ve definitely seen before) and this trail had large amounts of them carpeting the understory.

Like other ferns I’ve encountered, the bracken ferns had cool patterns in their leaf veins and leaf shape.

Another thing I got to see for the first time was clubmoss. Clubmosses aren’t actual mosses, but are a group of vascular plants that are from a group distinct from the flowering plants that are particularly familiar (much like ferns or conifers). I haven’t seen any clubmosses in my local area, but on this hike I got to see two very different looking species.

I’m pretty sure this one is blue clubmoss, but regardless, it is for sure one of the species in a genus known as ‘ground cedars’ for their tree-like appearance. If I hadn’t heard of clubmosses, I’d probably have thought they were some sort of evergreen tree seedling, especially since the dominant trees in the forest canopy were pine trees. I might’ve started doubting this when I saw plants with strobili (which is apparently what the spore-producing part of the plant is called);

The leaves really do look very cedar-like, though.

There was also quite a lot of this clubmoss, growing underneath the ferns and other understory plants.

This one, stag’s horn clubmoss, looks quite different from the blue clubmoss, but they’re not too distantly related. If they had had strobili on them at the time I found them that would have made for a slightly stronger resemblance, but they did not. There was also not nearly as much of this kind, and I very easily could have walked right by it without noticing (actually, I did the first time, I spotted this on the way back).

This was one I didn’t recognize at all when I first saw it, but it was quite distinctive looking so it wasn’t hard to identify. It is called pipsissewa and it is a type of wintergreen. This one managed to hold on to its seed pods for an especially long time, which also helped with identification.

There was a fair amount of lichens around where we were hiking, but this reindeer lichen particularly stood out as being something I don’t see closer to home.

Spring Ephemeral Series #3

Here’s another one of the spring ephemerals:

White Baneberry

White baneberry is a larger individual plant than most of the spring ephemerals, but there’s only a couple of them in the woods. This species is also called doll’s eye because the poisonous berries look like doll eyes.

It was absent from the main ephemeral display last year because the spring brought a variety of inclement weather, including a warm period followed by some hard freezes and that seemed to get the better of this plant. Fortunately, after checking on it later, I saw that the plants had berries coming along on them, so they must have bloomed at some point (there are no paths to that spot, so I don’t get back there super often… and it seems even more inaccessible lately since some big branches have come down). There was one year, though, where I managed to get some cool pictures of it with wild geraniums coloring the background… which turned out to be a surprisingly awkward angle to try to get. (Shooting from a standing position was too high an angle, and from crouching was too low…)

Snow on the Mountains

On the day we left New Mexico it had snowed overnight, and the mountains were cloaked in clouds when we got up. As the morning went on, the clouds started to dissipate. I went outside for a bit to stretch my legs before getting on the road for most of the day, and decided to point my telephoto lens at the snow covered mountain, and wound up getting what turned out to be some of my favorite photos from the trip. There are bits of cloud still caught up in the mountain in these and snow dusted trees.

Spring Ephemeral Series #2

Here are a couple more of the woodland spring ephemerals for you:

Maianthemum Stellatum

These are possibly the second most numerous wildflowers in our woods, (though the unobtrusive euonymus flowers are also a possibility) and they tend to spread and grow in thick patches. There seem to be quite a lot of common names for this species, but I don’t like any of them. They’re pretty much all false something, and also overly long. The one I’ve heard most frequently is starry false Solomon’s seal. Sometimes I call it starry maianthemum, though I did just make that up.

Like the other members of its genus the arrangement of the leaves on their slightly zigzag stem give them and interesting pattern to try to capture in my photography.

They also have neat looking berries as they’re ripening up. (So much so that I’ve posted about maianthemum berries specifically before!)

And the flowers are appreciated by a variety of insects. Here’s a longhorn beetle enjoying the maianthemum flowers.

Euonymus obovatus

Euonymus obovatus is a small plant that creeps across the ground, largely hidden from view by the other ephemerals. It is another that I don’t much like the common name- running strawberry bush. (I believe it’s named after another plant called strawberry bush… but still.) I don’t have a lot of good photos of this one since it tends to hide in the shadows, but it is an interesting looking little plant. it was about the last of the ephemerals I managed to identify so I don’t know a lot about this one either.

Wasp Watching

The past year turned out to be a good one for getting wasp photos for me, particularly this past August. When the first of the goldenrod started to bloom these plants turned into magnets for pollinators of all sorts, but I particularly noticed a lot of wasps, not just in numbers of individuals, but in diversity of species as well.

Before that, wasps had been congregating on the spotted horse mint / spotted bee balm (both common names for monarda punctata) in the pollinator garden by the house. I was having fun seeing how many different kinds I could spot as well as just appreciating their many different shapes and colors… but as I realized going through them later, even some very similar looking ones turned out to be different species.

I wanted to show off in this post some of the wasp variety I’ve been able to photograph through the years, though of course what I’ve managed to photograph is just a tiny sampling of what exists (there are some truly wild looking wasps out there, of which I’ve managed to photograph only a few). Also some of these photos are ones I’m more satisfied with than others.

The northern paper wasp (polistes fuscatus) has a significant amount of variety packed into one species. Their varied colors and markings make them fun subjects, plus I was starting to notice what seemed to be the same individuals hanging out on the same flower patches each day when I was doing really regular wasp walks.

This is a type of oak gall wasp laying eggs in an oak bud. Oaks are hosts to an impressive number of gall wasps, as well as other gall making insects which is part of why oaks are considered such important members of their ecosystems.

five banded thynnid wasp on flat-topped goldenrod

The common name of this wasp is the gold-marked thread-waisted wasp (which sounds more like a description of the wasp than a name… but at least it’s an accurate description!) These are certainly interesting looking creatures, but I’m not particularly happy with most of the pictures of them I have so far. Fortunately they don’t seem to be a rare species so hopefully I’ll be able to get some better pictures at some point.

grass carrying wasp on flat-topped goldenrod

This tachytes wasp (a genus known as sand-loving or green-eyed wasps) was quite mesmerizing, with both the green eyes and silvery stripes on the wasp’s abdomen being very shiny and reflective. The stripes even seemed to change color depending on the angle and lighting. These were also fast moving wasps, which probably exaggerated the reflective characteristics and made the wasp seem to shimmer in the sun. It also made it that much trickier to get good photos…

The four-toothed mason wasp is a fairly common species, and I’ve photographed them before, but this particular little guy gave me the opportunity to get the best pictures I have of this species.

The same wasp (I have quite a few pictures of him).

bald faced hornet enjoying the goldenrod.

This wasp was so tiny you might assume it’s a fruit fly if you see one… and this isn’t even as tiny as wasps get!

Great black digger wasp on swamp milkweed.

This mason wasp (euodynerus crypticus) may not have a common name, and there doesn’t seem to be much information about them out there. What little I was able to find piqued my interest, though; apparently it may be a social wasp, which I hadn’t heard of in the mason wasp family before. In any case, this species was regularly visiting the spotted bee balm, so I got to see them regularly for a little while.

Some sort of ichneumon wasp on the back of my hand. I found this wasp halfway through December!

Many species of solitary wasps, like this rusty spider wasp, specialize in hunting a specific type of prey that they will cache in a nest for their offspring. In the case of spider wasps, they specialize (as their name implies) in hunting spiders. I noticed one of these wasps hanging around the entrance to the garage one day, and then she disappeared into the garage for a while and I lost track of her, only to later spot her dragging a huge spider out!

Black giant ichneumon wasp on a dead tree.

four-banded stink bug wasp excavating a nest in sand. This wasp is also named for what they specialize in hunting.

Great black digger wasp on spotted bee balm.

A close up of the black giant ichneumon wasp. These wasp are a challenge to photograph because they’re just so long. They don’t fit in the frame well.

Myzinum maculatum is another wasp that doesn’t seem to have a common name, but they are closely related to the other thynnid wasps in this post.

Common thread-waisted wasp. I think this wasp had an injured wing, sadly.

Great golden digger wasp on spotted bee balm.

Four banded stink bug wasp on flat-topped goldenrod.

I found this cuckoo wasp at a local park. When I’ve seen cuckoo wasps before they’ve been pretty skittish, so I was happy to finally find one that was cooperative!

This picture shows the cuckoo wasp (the same one from the previous picture) between my knuckles, which shows how small this one was.

I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of wasps I can find this year!

Algaescape

From a distance the green algae growing in the wet pondish area last spring looked kind of foamy and not very interesting, but through the macro lens it took on an entirely different character and I could see that the ‘foam’ was made up of tiny algae filaments trapping lots of little air bubbles. While I was taking pictures of the algae I spotted a tiny springtail just walking over the water which I made sure to get in some photos as well. It turned out I got a couple more springtails in my photos that I didn’t see at the time (it was kind of hard to see what I was doing much of the time anyway; I was leaning out over the water to reach the algae but I couldn’t really lean far enough to look through the viewfinder properly most of the time). I thought the results were super interesting looking, and I ended up returning to it to take more photos.