Hopping and Hiding

It would be nice if I could start out my blog today by telling you about the amazingly insightful things I was thinking as I did my bug walk today, but if I thought anything at all I have completely forgotten it by now, so... sorry. No insight. I might have spent some time wishing for leaves to appear on the trees, but we don't really get fully leafed out trees until May, so that's not going to be happening soon. And I think I had a passing thought about manufacturing vitamin D because it was sunny. But I am pretty sure that's it.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Grasshopper nymph. You can tell it is not an adult because the wings are not fully developed. I don't know a lot about grasshoppers, but this looks to me like it is time for it to molt. Or maybe it just molted - it is very wrinkly.

 It was in the rock garden, and the only reason I saw it is because it jumped, and even then, having seen roughly where it landed, I had a hard time finding it. It blends in very well with the leaf litter, of which there is a bit in the rock garden.

 It looks just like a bit of dried leaf. I'll bet that this is another insect that spends its winter in the leaf litter. I wonder what this is going to look like when it's an adult, if it is still going to be so uniformly brown, or if it will be more colorful, like a lot of other grasshoppers. I don't know what kind this is, and my books don't show the immature stages of grasshoppers, so I don't know what it is going to look like later.

It looks like spring azure butterflies are going to be a regular feature in the backyard (mostly the rock garden) this year, which is a very nice thing.

 

 

 This one did a lot of rubbing the wings against each other, so I nice glimpses of the blue wing color. She never opened her wings out flat, though.

 I say she, because this is a female; that black strip along the edge of the upper wing shows this is a female.

 She was having a lot of trouble with the wind trying to blow her over.

 This still strikes me as funny...

 The wind was blowing the edges of her wings and bending them. No wonder butterflies so often end up looking very ragged and broken.

I did follow some of the spring azures around today in the yard, but also at one point I think one of them was following me. It was clearly not following me so I would take its picture, as it did not cooperate when I tried. I don't know why it was following me. It must have just enjoyed my company.

There were a lot of bees in the rock garden again:

 I didn't get pictures of a lot of them, but they were there.

They were also on the dandelions:

 I took this picture to show that there is a violet growing right next to this dandelion.

 This is the same dandelion an hour later. I know that dandelions close up when it's wet or cold sometimes, but I don't know why this one closed up in the middle of a warm afternoon.

There's two insects in this dandelion, a sweat bee and an ant.

 This ant was on the trunk of a tree, and when I was trying to take its picture, instead of just scurrying away as ants normally do, it threw itself down the trunk. It did this a couple of times, falling about a foot each time. Here it is just above the roots.

Fly

 Moth

 Click beetle

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Tiny jumping spider with prey. I don't know if I have ever seen a jumping spider that was so plain before. Usually they have patterns of some kind, or a iridescent color, or something other than plain brown. Still cute, though.

Spider on its web, sitting in the middle, trying to look small.

Here follows a sequence of four out-of-focus pictures that I am including just so you can see the sequence of events. When I take pictures of spiders on their webs, sometimes I disturb them and they will scurry off the web to hide on whatever it is the web is attached to, a branch or leaf, or something like that. I think I disturbed this one, and it stood up but then changed its mind about scurrying away, and folded its legs back up again. That is what these pictures show.

Alarmed...

Eh, never mind...

You can't see me.

Bowl and doily spider with prey. You can kind of see the randomness of the web. Nothing like an orb weaver's web, that classic spiderweb shape everyone thinks of when they think of a spider web.

Hanging out on the lawn chaise.