This morning, husband spotted a very large, very handsome yellow and brown moth on the city-supplied black trash container, nestled into a depression that runs on the back side of it.   After looking into a couple of books (whose pictures showed this species with different markings--it's variable) I found it on BugGuide.net    There's not a record ( Read more... )

Yesterday afternoon I was walking back from Owl Pavilion, still in the NW meadow, when I spotted something tiny, black-and-white, flittering near my feet.


( Read more... )

Yesterday, while out on our walk, we flushed a small cloud of pale moths from the tall grass...most fluttered weakly a yard or so then went back down in the grass, where it was hard to photograph them.  One didn't.  Today, thanks to a helpful person on BugGuide.net (useful resource for anyone interested in insects, spiders, and other invertebrates ( Read more... )

Yesterday afternoon when the sun came out, we went out on the land.  Butterflies, dragonflies, birds, and other critters also thought it was a good time to come out after huddling in the storms overnight.

In the southwest meadow, the dogbane was blooming.  This is an attractive plant, with reddish stems, smooth green leaves, and clusters of very ( Read more... )

It's not fully loaded yet, but there's a Butterfly & Moth Gallery in my Scrapbook.

(More newbie problems.  I tried to go back and add the URL of that gallery and ran into multiple problems.  Let's see if I've got it working now...and no, I don't know why the first line suddenly indented itself and won't go back where it belongs.  So I finally ( Read more... )

Huh?  You ask.  Well, there's this really nifty website being built to collect data on all the butterflies and moths in North America.  You can find it at www.butterfliesandmoths.org.   The idea is to have, eventually, a species list for every county in every state.   At present, it's incomplete.  To contribute a species you know is in your county ( Read more... )