Vacation bugs!

There were lots of cool bugs (and unfortunately some not so cool ones-ugh, chiggers!) on our vacation this year.

This luna moth was in the eaves of the camp office building, evidently hiding from the nuclear powered black flies that were at the campground. Gorgeous, though!




I've always wanted to see ant lion nests in the wild, and the forest floor in the campground was littered with them! Antlions are totally cool-think sarlaac monster from Return of the Jedi, but instead of henchmen falling to their doom it's ants.
This is a little hard to see, but if you look close at the tips of all the stalks of the bushes there are dragonflies hanging out on them-they were really pretty with gold spots all along their abdomens. It was a mix of males and females, though, so there was a lot of jockeying for the "good" twings to impress the ladies :)

Seriously?!

As if the bazillions of bugs in our house (we literally remove between 20 and 200 a day - STILL) weren't enough, we now have BLACK WIDOW SPIDERS preying on them. In our house. I don't have a problem with spiders, or with poisonous spiders, but NOT in my house!


Here she is- currently eating a stinkbug. I'm glad she's occupied at least! She's now taken up residence in a spice jar, with a nice secure lid out on our porch.

A few gratuitous gross bug pictures

This is why I'm not a fan of stinkbugs. Fortunately, although we still find pockets of them (I pulled 44 out of the backpack I haven't used since I left State College this afternoon), they've almost all disappeared, and Shasta makes short work of any that she finds.


The trashcan in our house...

Our windows...

And just so you don't think Virginia is just totally disgusting, we do have some really cool bugs.
This one hangs out by our front door.

Invaders!

Our new house is great, but has a couple thousand teensy-tiny problems...namely Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs (Halyomorpha halys). Basically think brown, mobile stink factories that swarm your house. But the pictures really say it a ll...


Our porch, under one of three mats that we laid down to trap the bugs before they got into the house...


The vacuum cleaner after I was done sucking them all up...it literally will never be the same again.

Photo Phun

Our collaborators needed some ALB pictures, so I got to set up an insect photoshoot last week. I got a good, slightly creepy shot of a beetle and decided to ramp it up in photoshop. I was pretty happy with it as a rough attempt.

The original picture:

And my modifications:

Stream Macroinvertebrates!

For the class I've been teaching this semester we did a stream quality assessment using stream invertebrate populations. I'd forgotten how much fun it is to ID aquatic insects! These are some drawings I made for my students!

News and pictures from this summer

New doggie! (again) We got her from the Huntingdon SPCA, and we had a surprisingly good experience with them. The approval process took only as long as it took to get our landlord's approval, and they spayed her, microchipped her, played with her and gave us a bag of dog treats, toys and food to start out with. How nice!

She's a little black lab mix- maybe with hound of some kind, or collie? I don't know. She's little, though, only forty pounds (soaking wet) and she has a little white strip on her chest, with a very narrow face. Very cute. She's maybe 8 months old, and bounces and chases her tail and LOVES to play. She seems to be housebroken, by some miracle, but that's about the extent of her training. Her name's Shasta (like the daisy).

She really wants to play with Gemmy. It's a shame that the two of them speak completely different languages- when Gemmy says "Go away and leave me alone", Shasta hears "Play with me!" and when Gemmy smacks her upside the head, Shasta gets frustrated and very confused. She leaves the bunny mostly alone though, which is great.

There are lots of things going on- we thought we'd share some images from this crazy summer, and we'll post some of the new house/doggie soon.

We took this in May after visiting our friends T. and M... I love the way that you can see how good Jim is at skipping stones!

We went to Delaware this summer- to Cape Henlopen, to be exact- for 2 blissful days at the beach. Wonderful. The other two pics are from birding with my dad, and it was a beautiful morning in Central Pennsylvania.

After our lease ended, we housesat for a little more than a week at a house with 8 dogs and 2 cats. One of the cats (not pictured) is beautiful. The other, well, he's very sweet.

After housesitting, we moved to our friends' E and A's house for 2 months- which was a blast. (Thanks again!) We did some canning, some chicken-coop building, and ate leeks.

Here's the finished chicken coop. Of course we couldn't leave well enough alone, so we added ears and a tail when E and A were out of town...

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Then I went out to sea to do some field work for my lab for a few weeks in September - so here's a couple pics... the Gulf of Mexico is beautiful, when there aren't hurricanes.

Our new house- it doesn't look a lot like this anymore- the shutters came off, and the ivy's down now (as per our landlord's request). Moving in was... fun... we had to take a zillion boxes out of the basement and unpack them. It exhausted poor little kitty, who was a big help. Really. We also spent some time cleaning up outside, starting some planting, rebuilding a stone wall, and getting ready for winter. That's when Jim ran across his new (not so) Little Friend, who is a long horned beetle larvae, and is now living in an enclosure in the basement, where he's busy pupating.

We also managed to get up to Ithaca a couple of weekends ago, and go apple picking! I love apple picking! And there's lots of milkweed around, which is one of the most beautiful plants...

Anyway, more later...