
Once we pack up our cottage on White Lake and move back into town for the colder months, we review all of our cottage pictures to cull the poorer ones and label the ones we intend to keep. This includes an extensive process to identify the species we have photographed. Every year we find out we have photographed new species. The summer of 2024 was no exception, as we photographed and identified 17 new species. In this article, we are sharing with you pictures of six of the new species including a bird, a plant, a moth, a beetle, a dragonfly, and a spider.
The bay-breasted warbler feeds on tree-dwelling moths, small insects, spiders, and caterpillars. Adults grow to 14 centimeters in length. This immature female’s olive/yellow colouring will change to chestnut/bay colouring during the breeding season. We are delighted to know her.
We assume the beetberry was named for its clusters of bright red berry-like fruit. It is also known as strawberry blite. Beetberry is native to North America and can be found in woodlands and clearings. Plants bloom and fruit from June to August. This diminutive plant was ten centimeters tall in August.
The cattail dagger moth caterpillar can grow to three to four centimeters in length. The adult also has the common name marsh moth. The caterpillar is typically found along the edge of marshes where it feeds on cattails, grasses, sedges, and willows. Interestingly this, our first sighting of the species, was not in one of our marshes. We spotted it crossing the road near the cottage.
The adult flower longhorn beetle can be found on woodland flowers in June and July. The larvae feed on decaying wood. The adults vary in colour, ranging from black with yellowish stripes to all black elytra. This beetle is active during the day and can grow to 1.4 centimeters in length.
The horned clubtail is a large, slender dragonfly that grows to six centimeters in length. We saw this one with other clubtail dragonflies at the cottage. The horned clubtail dragonfly can be distinguished by the absence of a club and minimal striping on the sides of the thorax.
We enjoy watching the many species of small jumping spiders that actively hunt during the daytime as we sit around in the warm sunshine at the cottage. They actively pursue and catch prey using their large median eyes to recognize prey from over 30 centimeters away. They do not use a web to catch prey. This was our first grayish jumping spider. It was small, roughly 0.5 centimeters in length.
We continue to be pleasantly surprised each summer with the variety of new species of plants and animals we see and are able to photograph around our cottage. Clearly the more one looks, the more one will notice.
We used several field guides in preparing this article including: David M. Bird’s Birds of Eastern Canada; Roger Tory Peterson & Margaret McKenny’s Peterson Field Guide to Wildflowers of Northeastern and North-central North America; Dennis Paulson’s Dragonflies and Damselflies of the East; Tom Murray’s Insects of New England & New York; and, Larry Weber’s Spiders of the North Woods.