100 Species #100: Winter moth

This female winter moth Operophtera brumata came into the house resting on my arm, after I had been outside doing some yard work. I squealed and brushed it onto the kitchen floor, then realized it was just a moth with horribly vestigial wings.

The female winter moth has little stubs where wings should be. She crawls up from her buried pupa to the base of a tree or other object and lets her pheromones and the winged male do the rest of the work. The males are some of the only conspicuous insects active at this time of the year. Driving in the evenings, your headlights will illuminate little clouds of the beasts, looking like tiny autumn leaves or dirt-colored snow flurries. Leave your porch light on and you will find dozens clustered about. This European pest has been devouring trees on both the northeast and northwest coasts of North America for about forty years.

This species was 365 Urban Species #85 and in two Urban Nature Pictures (as larva and as a male adult). There's a serious chance that I misidentified 100 species #50 and it's a winter moth caterpillar, not a spring cankerworm. Spring cankerworms and Bruce spanworms are native look-a-likes to the winter moth.


The same female, brought back outside.


Some of the 56 males that had gathered around our porch light that evening.

100 Species roundup

So that's done, and I'm relieved as usual. I like doing this project, confined to my own property to find species, it felt right. I am sheepish about probably misidentifying the spring cankerworm, and possibly the white pluteus. Even worse, I doubled number 42 and skipped number 55! Someone still needs an editor.

Here's the list:
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Of course, this is not a scientific list. The species are preselected by being interesting to me (I didn't feel like doing any slugs this year), by holding still long enough for a photograph (thus no squirrels or blue jays, the most common vertebrates in the yard), and by my ability to identify them.

There were 36 insects and 12 fungi species; it felt like these were the only two taxa for much of it, but they are my favorite, and arguably the most important taxa.

There were 27 plant species, 13 cultivated and 14 wild. I also feel sheepish for including so many cultivated plants, but I do need to learn them. On reviewing them I still had to double-check the names. ("Some blue thing" I wrote for glory-of-the-snow).

There were eleven vertebrates, including 6 birds (including the chicken), 2 amphibians, 1 reptile, and two mammals (one wild, one domestic). Two were photographed dead. I'll try to not do that for next year's project.

There were nine arachnids, including six spiders.

The balance was one species each of mollusk, millipede, centipede, crustacean, and slime mold.

Next year I hope to get more slime molds and fungi, maybe some more herps, and definitely try to get some more birds photographed.

Thanks for reading!