The Bugs in the Backyard: Finding a Bright Side

Part of the lawn in my backyard is beginning to be covered with a blanket of leaves, and as I was mowing the lawn I thought about the falling leaves. I am not a fan of autumn, as I have mentioned before, because I prefer it when things are coming to life instead of dying or going dormant, but then I remembered that the leaf litter is a source of protection and shelter for many species of insects and spiders, and even other animals; it is a nursery, a place for hibernation, a place for pupation. So it's not just dead leaves on the ground, it is a habitat. Many creatures rely on it. Then I felt a little bit less gloomy about the autumn thing.

But then this hopped out of the leaf litter in front of the lawn mower:

I don't know how it hopped, because it is missing its hopping back legs. And most of the back of its body. I obviously ran over it with the lawn mower, and I feel terrible about it. I feel like it is looking at me reproachfully in this picture. I try very hard not to run over living things (except for grass, obviously) with the lawn mower, but sometimes they hop in a wrong direction and my reflexes fail me.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

I don't know what this is. This is the closest look I got at this bug. So why, you may be wondering, did I make it Backyard Bug of the Day? Well, I didn't really have anything better. And I thought it was very interesting to watch, even if I couldn't see it up close.

Here's a magnified view

So, what was so interesting about it? Well, it was flying around in this same area for quite a while - I would guess it was guarding some bit of airspace that it considered its territory.

If you look carefully you can find two of them in this shot - there were some aerial jousts when some other insect wandered past the border of this insect's territory. I think they are probably hoverflies of some kind.

Obviously, this is kind of an impossible thing to take pictures of, but I tried it anyway.

Here's something interesting I saw in the backyard today:

I saw this little creature scurrying up a spider's thread, but it was obviously not a spider.

It's a leaf hopper. It was running up the thread.

You are probably wondering why it was able to run up the thread and not get stuck to it, but spiders produce different kinds of silk for different purposes. For these threads that they use to travel across spaces between plants and things, it is not a sticky/catch-things kind of thread. Otherwise the spider would get stuck on it. But it was quite a novel sight for me to see another insect using one to move from plant to plant. It didn't make it all the way across, though; when it got almost to the leaf where it was attached, it hopped down to another leaf below. Given that leaf hoppers can both hop and fly, I have no idea why this one chose to travel by spider thread, but it did.

It got very cold last night; I don't know if it actually froze as forecast, but when I went to bed late last night the temperature was 35ºF, so it was at least pretty close to it. Then it took a very long time for the temperature to creep back up to the low 60s where it peaked today. So when I saw this bumblebee:

... which was quite sluggish, as bugs often are when it's cold, I was thrilled, thinking that the bugs I would find today would all be so stuporific.

Not so much.

These wasps were still pretty active.

And so was this one.

And this leaf bug.

This buffalo tree hopper stayed very still for me, though. This is the first buffalo tree hopper I have seen in ages - they have been really scarce this year.