Peep

I went out on the back porch a little while ago to see if it was still snowing (sigh... I know), and I heard something. I don't know exactly what it was, but I can narrow it down to something wonderful. It was one of those spring and summer nighttime sounds, a bug or a frog, something peeping out there in the darkness. It was lonely, whatever it was - there was no answering call. I, however, was thrilled to hear it. Particularly given that it was snowing earlier in the evening (but it didn't stick), the sound of spring in spite of the chill and the frozen precipitation was glorious to hear. Whatever it is that is calling out there, with a temperature barely over freezing, is one hardy critter.

Other signs of spring:

 The crocus hasn't quite opened all the way.

 It will be a while for these crocuses.

 I don't know what this is, but it's green, and it's pretty, and I am happy to see it.

I think this is bed straw. A very young, small plant at the moment.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

I think this is a sawfly of some kind. It is on the board underneath which The Cricket lives, but I didn't happen to notice if this was there before I flipped it over, or if it landed there while I was looking at The Cricket.

At least, I think I was looking at The Cricket. This is what I saw when I flipped the board:

On the lower left of the picture you can see a cricket, of course. But I don't know for sure if it is THE cricket. On the right of the picture is a slight depression in the ground - that is where The Cricket spent the winter. Both yesterday and today when I looked under the board, The Cricket's spot was empty. So it may have moved on, or it may just be moving around more under the board. I hope it is not planning on staying there forever - the board is going away as soon as I feel like I am not causing the death by hypothermia of anything living under it.

I've been waffling about whether or not to post this next picture. I've been trying to get a shot at one of these for days, and failing, and I got one today, but I already have a Backyard Bug of the Day. If I post this today, and get a better picture tomorrow... You know what? Never mind. Here's a picture of a bug:

Beautiful antennae on this bug.

Some curious things today:

 As the snow melts in some areas of the backyard I am seeing a cobwebby film on top of the grass. I have no idea what it is or how it got there.

 Here's a bit more of the grass tunneling that is going on. Today I caught a glimpse of the critter that did this - I was looking out an upstairs window and saw it scurry across one of the backyard paths into this structure. My guess is either vole or shrew. I have looked up both animals, and it could be either, but probably vole. Interesting thing I found out about both animals, that fits with my finding of tunnels of torn up grass where the snow has just melted - both spend the winter in the airspace between the ground and the snow cover. As much as I would like to post a picture of this animal, which I caught a few glimpses of last summer, this is never going to happen. It appears and disappears too suddenly. I never even get a good look at the thing.

Backyard Bird of the Day:

 Yellow shafted flicker. The yellow feathers are only visible when it flies as they are on the underside of the wings. There were a couple of these in the yard today, finding food (bugs, I think) in the grass, of which more and more is visible every day.

Here is the red bellied woodpecker again.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 Mite

 The same picture, zoomed in. Mites are really small.

 A spider on the garden shed...

And another on a tree branch.

A Pleasant Surprise

LOOK!

A crocus! Almost blooming! I actually gasped when I saw this today as I was walking out to get the mail. It was a completely unexpected joy to see this. If I thought my eyes were hungry for green, well, they were starving for a sign of life such as this. The crocuses in the backyard are still buried under snow, and though the snow has receded from along the front walkway, I thought it would be a while before we saw anything blooming there, either. But now it looks like there will be something blooming there tomorrow. What a wonderful thing is spring!

Crocus notwithstanding, it still felt like winter when I went out to get the mail, and this was almost two o'clock in the afternoon, with the temperature in the high 30s, so I wasn't going to bother with a bug walk. But it warmed up a little bit later, and the sun made a very brief appearance, and then I saw this:

Fly on the window. Outside. I also saw quite a few tiny winged things flit past the window, so I figured the bugs must be out and about, and I should be, too.

So, I went out, and it turns out that the bugs were excessively uncooperative today, refusing to land, or taking off immediately if I saw them sitting somewhere, or in every way they could think of avoiding allowing me to take a good picture. But eventually I found a couple that were too occupied with other things to make the effort to thwart me.

Backyard Bugs of the Day:

 Propagating the species.

I find this anatomically confusing regarding the legs.

 Here's something interesting. See on the bug on the left, there is a round, light colored appendage on the side right about where the thorax and the abdomen meet? (If you don't know which is the thorax, and which is the abdomen, just consider that the third body segment is the head, and you'll know enough for the purposes of this discussion).

Now look at this next picture:

You can't see that little appendage in this one, and that is because the bug was waving it back and forth really fast, so it's just a blur in the picture. From something I read once those are vestigal wings, but I don't remember what they are called, or what their function is (I thought it had something to do with flying, but there must be some other use, considering the bug was flapping them while not flying). Anyway, very curious.

Random Bugs:

 Looper

 Winter firefly

 I don't really understand why you'd want that thing covering your head completely, because it blocks the view of possible predators, but some beetles have it.

 This fly was delving into the plant stem with some sort of appendage. My uninformed guess would be that it was using an ovipositor to lay eggs, or it was sucking something out of it.

A pair of what I think were herons flew over.

 Cute, weird fungus inside a dead branch.

 The melting of the snow pack has revealed an irksome sight: some little animal burrowed through the grass under all of that snow. It's not looking good for the grass. As you know, I am not a big fan of lawns, but I do have a bit of one in the backyard, and I prefer to have grass instead of muddy bare ground. Well, maybe it'll grow back...

Arachnid Appreciation:
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My first sighting of a spider in the wild this spring!

 It's a real cutie.

To Every Thing There Is a Season

I don't know if spring is really the best name for this time of year. I think yo-yo would be better, because that is what the temperature does. Warm(ish) one day, snowing the next. In this case, by next I mean yesterday. It snowed all day. Miraculously we only got about 2 inches from all of that precipitation, because for most of the day the ground was too warm from the previous days of modestly warmer temps, but by the end of it all the ground was completely covered again. All of that lovely bare ground (which, I admit, is actually kind of ugly, but I love it right now anyway) had disappeared. Much sighing ensued. Then today the sun came out, the temperature crept above freezing a bit, and most of yesterday's snow melted. The backyard still has more snowy areas than bare ground, but today I was able to do a circuit, more or less, of my usual walking area wearing my gardening clogs instead of boots or snowshoes. It felt like a victory. A squishy, muddy victory. Also, I really want the dung beetles to come back.

In my last post I featured downy woodpeckers as Backyard Bird of the Day. Today I have something different:

 A hairy woodpecker! I know what you're thinking (unless you are a real birder, in which case you are better at this than I am) - that looks exactly like the downy woodpecker from the last post! Well, they look a LOT a like. For years I have been confused by them (and within a few days I will forget everything I have recently learned that I am about to tell you, and will go back to being confused) because they look so much alike, so when I see a woodpecker like this I have just been contented with knowing that it is either a downy or a hairy (even those names mean something similar). But since I was featuring the woodpeckers so heavily in that last post, I figured it was time to figure out which was which, and I looked it up. One difference is that the hairy is bigger than the downy, but that's really only useful information if you have two of them sitting next to each other. Then there was some information about one of them having white tail feathers, and the other having white tail feathers with a couple of black flecks, but these are the underneath tail feathers we're talking about. Do you even see those in this picture? No. So, I found one useful piece of information - the size of their beaks is different. The hairy woodpecker has a beak that is about the same length as its head, and the downy woodpecker has a shorter, stubbier beak. There, was that so hard? So, this is a hairy woodpecker.

I think.

There was only one woodpecker today, not a pair like the other day, and it was not picking of bugs from the bark of trees, but spent the whole time I saw it doing the classic woodpecker peck right in the same spot on this tree, which may be dead now. I am sad about that, because I love trees, but dead trees are a boon to woodpeckers, so I guess Nature knows what's best.

Note also the snow in the tree. Grrr.

The temperature today did not reach impressive heights, but it was sunny and above freezing so when I got a chance in the late afternoon, I did a bug walk. I had seen quite a few tiny flying things, and went out to see what I could see. And as often happens, I found a pleasant surprise.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 A moth! The other day I looked back at the bugs I found around this time last year, and I found a similar moth right around this point, but I didn't expect a repeat this year, because it's been so cold. I don't know if this is a moth that overwintered as a moth, or if this is something that has recently eclosed from its cocoon, but either way, I think it has probably emerged a little too soon.

 Close up of scales on the wing.

 For some reason one of the under wings was protruding at a weird angle.

I love moth eyes. They always look like they are undergoing the cartoon version of hypnosis.

Here's something else wonderful I found today:

 Possibly the worst picture I have ever posted here, but it's not the quality of the picture that is important, it is the subject, which is a wisp of spider silk wafting in the breeze. I was pleased to see quite a bit of spider silk on bushes in the backyard today, because there's no way after the winter we've had that these are anything but recently spun threads, which means there are spiders active in the backyard. I couldn't find any of the ones that made these threads, but they're out there!

This little tree had silk lines all over it.

Another fun find - cedar apple rust. It doesn't have tentacles at the moment, but some day...

I found another cricket, under another board, one we keep on the deck under potted plants. I happened to move the board and spotted the cricket. Under lumber is evidently a good place to spend the winter if you're a cricket.

I found a lonely snow flea on a tree:

 I don't know what those white flecks are.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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One of several spiders that lives under the same board as The Cricket. If you look carefully at the brown blur above it in the picture, that is a springtail. If I was a springtail I would not be creeping around spiders, even one that is so obviously trying not to be noticed.

Couples

Today's post is only indirectly about bugs - well, arthropods, anyway - and all I have are pictures of birds.

Backyard Birds of the Day:

There was a pair of downy woodpeckers in the trees in front of the house today. At least I think there was a pair. There could have been more than two; it was hard to keep track with the amount of flitting from tree to tree, but there were at least two, a male and a female. This is the female.

  Woodpeckers eat bugs (at least some of them do. And I know they don't all eat bugs exclusively, but let's just go with the woodpeckers eat bugs thing for a while here). I watched the two woodpeckers go from tree to tree, up and down the trunks, obviously looking for bugs to eat, and from the looks of things, finding them, too.

 See? Here she appears to be plucking something off the tree. I wondered what they could be finding, because there are not a lot of bugs out there at the moment (particularly because today was pretty cold again) and then I remembered all of the tree trunks I have seen that are covered in hundreds of snow fleas/springtails. I have posted pictures a few times, but probably not enough to really give an accurate view of how many of these things are around at the moment. I don't want to bore you, after all. But I will tell you this: the snow fleas are on a lot of the trees, and they are there in the hundreds, possibly thousands. So if you happen to live on a diet of bugs (or bug-like things, since springtails are not technically insects), there are plenty of them to eat. Of course, they are tiny, so you would have to eat an awful lot of them (which sounds pretty awful, really).

 View of the interesting markings on the back of the female.

Here's the male. I'll bet you can guess in what way the male and female are sexually dimorphic. Did you guess that they are dichromatic? Yes, you probably did, but maybe you didn't use that word. It means that the coloring is different on the males and females, and in this case the male has a red mark on the back of its head.

 Woodpecker in action.

 The obligatory flying away shot.

Another thing I found interesting today was that I saw several species of birds that I did not see the other day when I had all those different species at the bird feeder. I saw all of these in the front yard today (the bird feeder is in the back). There were the downy woodpeckers, chickadees (didn't get a picture of those), robins, and...

Finches - I think the species is house finch. I think this is the male...

... and this is the female. I know, not good pictures, but it was dark and gloomy today. Anyway, you can probably at least see that they are dichromatically sexually dimorphic. They are in trees in these pictures, but they were mostly foraging on the ground for food (along with other birds like juncos). They could do this because two days of rain have finally melted most of the snow in front of the house (not in the backyard, though. I don't think that snow is ever going to leave).