A Hopping Place

The air was full of bugs today. In addition to the March flies, there were woolly aphids flying around, and some other tiny bugs that were too small for me to identify. I just saw them whizzing by.

But not every bug was airborne, so I did get a few pictures.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Hopper

Remember the other day when I expected to see a lot of hoppers? Well, I was off by a couple of days (and, by the way, the high today was 71ºF):

 There's two here... Buffalo tree hopper and candy striped leaf hopper.

 One more on the same plant (just after I took this picture the buffalo tree hopper, which had started climbing the trunk of this sapling, flew up and landed right next to this candy stripped leaf hopper. No, I didn't get a picture. Well, I did, but it's too out of focus to share).

 Sharpshooter

 And another hopper, the one that was BBotD the other day. I noticed it while I was taking the picture of all those March flies. Speaking of which...

 Isn't it beautiful?

Now, about those March flies:

 There were a lot of them around today, so obviously I was wrong yesterday when I thought maybe their numbers were diminishing. Today they seemed to be congregating a lot - instead of everybody on their own leaf, there's a bunch together.

 When I went to cross the stile, there were a couple dozen of them on there.

Random Bugs:

 A couple of gnats fulfilling their biological imperative.

 Zoomed in you can see the sexual dimorphism. The female has a much bigger abdomen, because she has to produce eggs. Hers is a different color, too. While I was watching them, the male was drumming on her wings, which I would guess is a courting behavior.

 Crane fly

 Katydid on the porch. Haven't seen one of those in a while, though I have heard them.

 It looks like it got rained on (it sprinkled a little); maybe it was on the porch to get out of the rain. There was another katydid calling from a tree nearby.

 An egg mass of some kind on a tree trunk - I don't know what was in it, but it looks like they hatched.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Oh, and look what was right by the egg mass! You can actually see its rear legs in the picture above. This spider, or one like it (and at one point, two like it) has been seen on the same tree trunk, within a couple of inches of this same spot every day for about the last week or so.