What Season Is This?

Ah, another beautiful day in January. We flirted with 60ºF today, but I don't think we made it. Still, it was glorious. I am not sure we can call this a January thaw, because January has mostly been pretty mild to begin with, and there have been days at least the the low 50s scattered throughout. But I will say this - we are expecting a nor'easter tomorrow into the next day, and because of this mild weather pattern, we are supposed to get a lot of rain rather than a huge pile of snow. A nor'easter, you see, is not a snowstorm by definition - it has more to do with the wind, and the direction of it. Usually our nor'easters are snowstorms, because usually it's cold here in the winter, but at the moment we're having rain temperatures.

But enough about things that haven't happened yet - today was lovely, sunny, and warm, so I went out looking for bugs before I went off to the beach (no, I didn't go swimming, and I was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt - it's not THAT warm here).

The warm weather is obviously waking up (though they aren't really sleeping lots of bugs, and though I haven't actually seen a lot of them, I think I have heard them. A lot of insects and other creatures spend the winter in the leaf litter, and if you stand very still and quiet you can hear the sounds of very small things stirring among the dried leaves in the woods. It's the sound of nature stirring.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Some kind of Hemiptera.

 

 I found another in another part of the yard.

 There were springtails around, too.

 And quite a lot of candy-striped leaf hoppers. It's curious that it's only the candy-striped leaf hoppers I ever see on these warm winter days, never other species of leaf hoppers or other plant hoppers.

I would say that it was the arachnids, and not the insects, that won the day in the backyard today, though. The last few days I have seen a lot of random spider threads on plants in the backyard, but haven't seen any spiders until today. Arachnid Appreciation:
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 There were a couple of these spiders on a rock - at least two of them, but they were small and moving around so it is possible that there were three.

 

 There was a jumping spider on the same rock.

 Presumably the same harvestman from yesterday, because it was in the same place.

 And those tiny mites that were with it were still there.

Too small to see, really.