Footprints

Even though we had our first real snow last Saturday (and for the purposes of this post "real snow" is defined as snow that has to be shoveled, and won't just melt in the sun within a day of falling), there was a breath of spring in the air the last two days. I don't just mean because it was a little bit warmer (and for the purposes of this post, "a little bit warmer" means the high temperature got into the low 40s), but there's a certain quality to the air, not really a smell, but almost one, if your skin could smell, just something you feel that tells you that winter won't last forever. Now, I have no delusions that spring is nigh. Yes, January is the coldest month, and it wasn't that cold, but that doesn't mean that February, usually the snowiest month, won't be snowy. Still, the springiness led me to go outside looking for bugs today. My expectations weren't high, but I was hoping maybe to find some snow fleas, which, as you know, are not really fleas, but a species of springtails (I know you know this because you have read it on this blog). And in other winters I have been able to find bugs when the temperature rises above 40, even when there's a ton of snow on the ground (which there isn't now, by the way. Most of the 6 inches we got on Saturday has melted, and there are just a few blotchy areas in the backyard, and in places where the sun can't get to it). (I have used a lot of parentheses in this post. I should probably stop doing that). However, I probably waited too long to get out there, because the sun was quite low by the time I went out, and the one thing I have realized is that bugs like sunny weather even more than they like warm weather (though they do definitely have lower limits on temperature. Oh, drat, here I go with the parentheses again). So, all I found was a few springtails on the front walk.

 Not snow fleas, but related. They were very springy, though, and this was the only one I got a picture of. So unbelievably cute.

So, those were the only bugs I saw today, but this blog isn't JUST about the bugs, it's about other things I find in the backyard. Like...

Coyote footprint? It looks canine, and there are definitely coyotes in the area, and I have seen other... errrr... evidence that coyotes have been in the backyard. But I have seen that kind of evidence before. This is the first possible footprint, thanks to the fact that the snow has melted and left a bit of mud on one of the paths. There were several footprints along the path, but I did not come upon the a coyote by following them, like I did with the turkeys last week. What's funny is that for a couple of days after the snow fell, there were no animal footprints in the backyard other than the bird footprints around the bird feeder, and I was feeling a little sad that there were no animals in the backyard. But today I saw these coyote prints, deer prints, tunnels from some kind of small creature... all in the mud. Well, the tunnels were obviously dug under the snow, but now the snow is gone, there is just the muddy track.

Anyway, between coyotes, turkeys, and rabbits, you really have to watch where you step in the backyard lately.

Roomies

I have been looking for a hook to talk about something...

I was attempting to nap on the couch and my husband was sitting in his comfy chair reading when I heard him say, "Hello, Mr. Bug."

As you can imagine, this is just the kind of thing to get my attention, even if I am halfway into a snoozing state. I went to investigate and found that this had plopped down on the cushion of my husband's chair, startling him:

This is a brown marmorated stinkbug, an invasive species, alas. And in this case, what it was invading was our house. It has likely been here for some time, as it has been a while since it was warm enough outside for stinkbugs. I took its picture and then sent it outside, which was, perhaps, cruel of me, but it is where it belongs. Actually, no, it doesn't belong anywhere around here, it is an invasive insect, but anyway, I sent it on its way outdoors, and perhaps it may have found a crevice somewhere to curl up in before it froze.

And now, having found this stinkbug in my house, I have an excuse to talk about something that I read this week. Entomologist did a study of 50 houses in North Carolina, looking for bugs. Well, not just bugs, and not just insects, but arthropods - insects, spiders, and other related critters. According to one of the articles I read about it (and I read several), this was the first time a study had been done of what kinds of arthropods are living in our homes with us. As it turns out, many, many different kinds. They counted species, not individual specimens, and included living and dead ones. We may not see them very often, but they are here - in the 50 houses combined, they searched 550 rooms, and of those 550 rooms, in only 5 did the intrepid graduate students fail to find any arthropods at all. And even those 5 rooms may not have been arthropod free, as the searchers did not look in drawers or cabinets, or behind heavy furniture. So there may have been bugs hiding in those places. In total they found over 500 species of arthropods. The average number of species per home was in the 90s. The most they found in one home was 211. 211 species of insects and/or spiders in one home.

Now, the researchers were surprised at their findings, because they did not expect to find so much arthropod diversity in human dwellings. Now, you might be freaking out about now, even though you are obviously a person interested enough in bugs to be reading a blog that is primarily about bugs, but you don't need to be freaking out. Yes, you have bugs in your home, but it doesn't mean that your house isn't clean. It just means that it provides the right habitat for something tiny and multi-legged. Of all the creatures they found, they didn't find very many of the kinds of insects that are generally classified as pests - cockroaches, bedbugs, or termites. The biggest categories were arachnids (spiders), Diptera (flies), Coleoptera (beetles), and Hymenoptera (bees, wasps, and ants).

Now, I have always figured that the reason so many bugs get into my house is because I live next to the woods, but these houses were all in different neighborhoods, within 30 miles of downtown Raleigh, NC. The study was done a couple of years ago in the summer and fall, in 2012 (I don't know if this is just hitting the many news outlets now because someone found out about it and everyone else jumped on the story, or if the results of the study have only recently been finished and published). From what I read, the entomologists plan to do further analysis, to see if there is a difference in bug populations based on the age of the home, whether or not people use air conditioning, and other criteria. I have to say that it all has me curious about how many species of insects and arachnids are in my house - and I have been disappointed for days that I have not seen any I could photograph to give me an excuse to blog about this - I saw a moth and a ladybug in the last couple of days, but neither in positions where I could get their picture. I am not planning to do a general survey of my whole house, however - though I could find a few in the spider web on the window a few feet away from where I am sitting right now.

One interesting thing I read about all of these insects is that a lot of them are helpful - obviously, the spiders eat insects, and some of the insect species are insectivorious, too, but others eat things like dead skin cells and toenail clippings (I have to admit, I was not at all grossed out by knowing how many species of bugs are living in homes, but I was grossed out by the thought of them eating toenail clippings, for some reason), so they are helping to clean your house, in their own, disgusting, little ways.

The point is, they're here. They're not hurting us. And that is life.

This Was No Trot

January has been acting like January lately, which means it has been cold, so obviously I haven't bothered to go looking for bugs. We finally got enough snow to cover the grass, just barely, and it has stuck around for a few days because the temperature has been below freezing. Definitely not bug weather (although... I take it back. Over the weekend we had a day in the 40s, and I did see a couple of bugs that day when I was walking around in the backyard, but I didn't have my camera. Anyway, it was just a winter cranefly, a fly, and some springtails, so nothing I would have bothered to post here). One of the many fun things about snow, even snow that is just barely able to cover the grass, is that it lets you know when there has been wildlife walking around in the backyard. Today, for instance, I looked out an upstairs window and saw than an area of the lawn was covered in footprints.

As you see here:

 There were a lot of them.

 I knew what they were from when I first saw them out the window - turkey footprints. This is not the first time there have been turkeys in my backyard, but I haven't seen any in a few years, I don't think.

 Turkeys have big feet.

 I followed the footprints along one of the paths, where they just stopped right before the stile. I couldn't tell where they had gone, until I climbed the stile myself...

 ... and saw a big flock of turkeys in my neighbor's yard. Yes, I know I am breaking my own blog rules by posting this, because the rules say the pictures have to be of things in my backyard, but work with me here - if I had looked out the window a few minutes sooner I probably would have seen them in my backyard. In fact, if I had looked out a different window earlier I suspect I would have seen them marching up my driveway. Here you can see some on the grass, and the ones on the right are standing on a stone wall. I didn't get any good pictures because there was this tangle of bushes between me and the turkeys, and when I crossed the stile and started down the other side, hoping to get a better vantage point, they did something I did not expect...

 Now, as I have said, there have been turkeys in the backyard before. I have seen them a handful of times. I have also seen what they do when they have decided to get away from the human lurking nearby, watching them - they run off into the woods. But that's not what these turkeys did - they FLEW.

 I know that turkeys can fly. But I thought that they flew like chickens, kind of clumsy, and fluttery, and barely getting off the ground. It turns out they fly really well, and really fast, and they take off like rockets. Well, not straight up, propelled by an explosion, but lets just say they get airborne really efficiently. I was flabbergasted. And impressed.

 And hey, I learned something today!

What Is Smaller Than Itsy Bitsy?

As we know, trees are popular living spaces for bugs, particularly in the winter, when bugs like to hunker down in a sheltered spot to get out of the cold. Which means that if you bring a tree inside during the winter, say, a Christmas tree, chances are there are bugs living in it who are going to think that it is now springtime. This means that you then end up with bugs wandering around your house. I haven't had a big problem with this over the years, but usually after we get our Christmas tree I will find a few bugs in the days after. This year I saw a couple on the tree, but I didn't notice any that had moved off the tree. I did notice a few days ago (we un-decorated the tree over the weekend, and brought it outside today, so it's still been in the house until now) that there was a spider web around the top of the tree, and one spanning a pretty long space from the tree to a wall - just a couple of threads, not a full orb web (too bad). I don't know if this was from a spider that was already living in the house, or one that came in with the tree - it's pretty nice, though, after reading about the Ukrainian tradition of spiders on Christmas trees, and putting a spider ornament and some spiderweb ornaments (which I made later and didn't post here), to have a real spider on the tree.

Anyway, today I was sitting on the couch, working on my laptop computer, when I saw something silhouetted against the light of the computer screen, something that was dangling from an extremely fine thread. The something was infinitesimal, so small I could barely see it, but it looked like a spider - well, it looked like a dot with a bunch of legs sticking out from it. When I say this thing was small, I mean it was smaller than this: . I caught the thread on my finger and then moved the speck onto a piece of paper I had nearby. It began to move. It was so small that I couldn't see its legs moving, all I could see was that a tiny dot, smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, was moving around on the piece of paper.

Naturally I tried to get pictures of it, and they were terrible, because the maybe-spider was so small, and it was moving. Here's the best I got:

 I think it's a spider. A baby spider. Which could mean that there are a LOT more of these around, and they are so small that I can't see them. I am not especially crazy about that idea, even though I like spiders. But it is possible that there were spider eggs on the Christmas tree, and being inside for a month gave them the impression that it was springtime and time to hatch. Not that it would have been so different for them outside this year. Although it's been closer to normal since the new year began, December was pretty springlike in the great outdoors. Anyway, that's a possibility.

 Here's the above picture, zoomed in. It could be a mite instead of a spider, but I don't think mites produce silk. Actually, I have never thought about it - I have no idea if mites produce silk. Give me a minute to find out... ... ... ... ... ... Okay, yes, mites make silk, at least some of them. So it could be a mite. I did not get a good enough look at it, or a good enough picture, to be able to tell.

Here's a really bad picture, but you can judge the size of it by the pixels of ink on the paper.

The reason I haven't blogged lately is, as you have probably surmised, because it has been too cold. Some days have been in the low 40s, but I know even if I find anything on those days, it's not going to be anything other than the few things I have been seeing. Mostly springtails, I am sure. It was warmer over the weekend, almost 60 yesterday, but it rained all day. Today we only got to the mid 30s, and when I walked out to get the mail I even thought about the fact that even though it was sunny, there wouldn't be any bugs. Then I got back to the house and there was a fly on the wall of the porch. Clearly, I still know nothing. But I didn't take a picture of the fly. Just telling you that even on a day when we barely get above freezing, bugs are out there, doing their thing. Sometimes it amazes me how little I have always understood the natural world. And now I know enough to know that I know nothing.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

I know, it's the 4th day of the year, but that's still pretty new. It's not all scuffed up yet.

The first day of Christmas gave us a beautiful day in the 60s, and I went hiking in shorts. Today, the 11th day of Christmas, gave us this:

 The snow was unexpected, by me, anyway, because it was not in the forecast. It was supposed to be sunny all day. And cold. They were right about the cold, though it was warmer than forecast, too - the high was supposed to be 29ºF and it got up to 30ºF. Woo hoo. Still below freezing (and right now, as I write this in the wee small hours of the morning, we are in single digits. Fahrenheit). This, however, was our first snow, unless you count the flurries we had one day in October. We had quite a bit of sleet one day last week, but we didn't have snow until today.

 Anyway, we got just enough snow to cover the ground, and then most of it went away, even though the temperature didn't get above freezing. A little lingered in the mossy areas of the yard, though.

 The most interesting thing on this frigid day was the ice crystals that form from water in the soil freezing and building crystal towers. Short towers.

 The crystals pushed up the moss in a lot of places.

 Still, that December dandelion is progressing. But what would take a couple of days in the spring takes about a month or more in the winter, apparently.

And then, there's this:

It is not unprecedented for me to have daffodils sprouting in my yard in the first week of January, but usually they just barely break the surface, and then they are covered in snow, and remain hidden under there for about 2 months. I have never seen them up so high at this point in the winter. They were obviously confused by the warmest December on record. Fortunately for them, our current deep freeze is not expected to last long, just two days, but I am not sure how the rest of the winter is going to play out with these hapless flowers.

In case you are wondering, no, I didn't see any bugs today. I didn't expect to, though I did look for them in a cursory way. I didn't bother looking most of last week, either, because we were in the low 40s most of the time, and it was cloudy and gloomy all week, and the bugs prefer sunshine. I did see a fly on the front porch yesterday afternoon, but I was on my way out, and didn't want to get the camera just to take a picture of a fly. This is basically the time of year when this blog goes on hiatus. I'll do a post if I see something interesting, whether bug or otherwise, but for now, I'll just be dreaming of spring.