The Rewards of Perseverance

I'm not really one for routines, so I don't do my bug walk the same way every day. The routes I take around the yard vary according to my whim - or according to the weather, or according to whether or not I already know where to find something in particular that I want to find. Today I started with my one real flower bed (which is 99% weeds right now, so I should probably stop calling it that), which is right next to the back porch, and in that flower bed I found the Backyard Bug of the Day, Backyard Bud of the Day, 2 spiders, and a couple of Random Bugs. My whole bug walk could have been over in 5 minutes, with fewer than 25 pictures taken. But given that I took almost 400 pictures today (that is a lot even for me), you may surmise that, in spite of the heat and humidity, I kept going. And I was really, really glad I did, because there was some really cool stuff in the yard today. I guess we have the verdict on what the bugs think about the warmer weather...

There will be Co-Bugs of the Day today again, not because I am being wishy-washy, but because there are two that deserve it.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

A new species of leaf hopper that I have not seen before. I was pretty excited to see it. I got two shots, one out of focus, before it hopped away. It was not ready for its close-up.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

 This is one of the most interesting things I have ever found in the yard. What is it? A space alien!

Just kidding. It's a caterpillar. When I first spotted it I thought it was a chrysalis, but a little investigating in books and online seems to say it's a Smaller Parasa Moth Caterpillar.

 This little beast defies all of your preconceived notions of what a caterpillar looks like, doesn't it? I will try to get better pictures of it tomorrow. It was perfectly still today, so I would love to see how this thing moves. Oh, and by the way, it apparently is one of those stinging ones, so if you ever find one, keep away from those little spines!

Backyard Bud of the Day:

One of the weeds in my garden. What can I tell you, I didn't plant it.

Moths in the wild:

Gaze at that face for a minute...

Okay, brace yourself for a ton of random bugs here:

 I don't post many pictures of ants. I probably should post more, because they are entertaining.

 Tree cricket in a hammock. Interesting fact: I have never seen a tree cricket in or on a tree. Here's what I just read about snowy tree crickets (which this is) in my book: "The snowy tree cricket is also known as the thermometer cricket because the rate of its chirping (as with many other singing insects) speeds up in higher temperatures. Dolbear's formula asserts that the air temperature in degrees Fahrenheit equals the number of snowy tree cricket chips in 1 minute, minus 40, divided by 4, and plus 50." Umm... I think I'll just stick to my electronic weather sensor.

 Red aphid?

So, in the future we will see mo' weevils.

 There are ways other than sight to find bugs. Sometimes I find them by sound. Sometimes, like with this caterpillar, I find them by touch - by walking into the silk thread on which they are dangling from a tree.

 Assassin...

 I love these immature hoppers. I have no idea what this is going to look like when it's fully grown, but I like the blue at the end of the tail. These are fun to watch, they way they sway back and forth, the way they hop... Try to find one to watch some day.

 I just wanted to show how many tiny bugs are on this goldenrod. And an ambush bug, of course.

 I haven't featured a long-legged fly in a while...

 Very handsome dragonfly. That's not its name, that's just my opinion of it. It's not in my book, natch.

 There are several of these caterpillars (at least, I think they are caterpillars - it looks like they have the right number of prolegs) on an oak sapling, with several of them on the same leaf. They are still really small right now, but it looks like they have graduated from scraping the green part off the leaf to being able to take bites of the whole leaf. They do an interesting body arching thing, and an interesting hanging upside down thing, which I will try to get pictures of.

These eggs are on the same leaf with the caterpillars, so I surmise that they hatched from there, and if that is so, then they are not like monarch caterpillars, whose first meal is the egg they hatched out of.

There seems to be a cocoon inside this curled up vine. So of course it looks like the vine snagged something, but that is, of course, not the case. We do not have Little Shop of Horrors in the backyard.

I found some more eggs:

 They look like what I saw when I looked up ladybug eggs the other day, though they are on a tree trunk, not the bottom of a leaf. Which means either they are the eggs of something else, the internet is wrong again, or there is a ladybug out there that doesn't know what she's doing.

There were two patches of these eggs a couple of inches apart on this tree - one just on the bark, and the other in a crevice on the trunk.

Oh, and by the way - they yellow gunk on that ladybug I posted the other day was a fungus that is not fatal to the ladybug, so it's all fine.

Jack-in-the-pulpit fruit:

But don't eat this fruit. It's toxic.

The Spider Spectacular of the last week continues in Arachnid Appreciation!
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 Even for being in the shade this web was surprisingly dewy for afternoon...

 The bowl-and-doily spider again. I just liked this web because it has a swirl in it that looks like an unraveling galaxy.

 I actually got to see this spider from all sides today. Usually the way the webs are placed, I can only see one.