Gnawing

It's late, my head hurts, I don't know what to say...

There were not a lot of bugs around today. The temperature was in the low 50s, which is certainly warm enough for bugs, but I think the fact that the overnight low being 21ºF might have had something to do with the scarcity. I was outside in that cold last night for about half an hour, watching for meteors. I saw a few, but not really enough to make sitting outside in such cold temperatures worth it. I mean, there was frost on my chaise lounge. And what is frost? Ice. I was sitting on ice.

Needless to say there were no crickets to be heard last night. There were none to be heard this afternoon, either, but the one thing that I could hear loud and clear in the absence of cricket song, was the sound of a squirrel gnawing on nuts of some kind, about 50 feet up in a tree. It almost hit me with some of the pieces of shell it dropped. I was amazed at how well I could hear the gnawing, but when there's no bugs, and nobody in the neighborhood is running a lawn mower or a leaf blower, and it's not windy, it is amazingly quiet in the backyard. Well, if you can ignore the sounds of the cars on the highway a half mile away.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 A gnat with pretty wings. It flew away before I could get closer.

I did see one swarm of March flies:

 Quite a big swarm, too. Well, they are never very big, compared to insects that swarm in the millions, these are more like ten most of the time, but this was a bigger swarm than usual.

 Hmmm... I actually got a pretty clear shot of one of them... It's hard when there's no sunshine.

 Here's the zoomed-in view.

 Ant.

Cranefly attracted to the porch light, as seen through the storm door.