Is a zebra white with black stripes, or black with white stripes? Was today sunny with bouts of rain, or rainy with bursts of sun? All I know is, I had to stop my bug walk because of thunder, and wait for the rain and lightning to finish before I could finish my walk. Walking around in a thunderstorm holding a metal pole just seems like a bad idea.
But when I woke up this morning... glorious sunshine! Oh frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!*
So what if most of the time I was out looking for bugs it was cloudy and sometimes raining? At one point there was sunshine and thunder together.
We happened to be in the middle of a burst of sunshine when I went out to get the mail today, and while I was on my way back inside I saw something odd on the side of the house and decided to investigate it. It turned out to be an ant dragging a dead caterpillar, and while I was determining that, I happened to look down and see a six-spotted tiger beetle on the rock next to me. Great, I finally get close to a six-spotted tiger beetle, and I don't have my camera. So I asked it to stay, went inside, came back with my camera, and the beetle was waiting for me. I took a couple of pictures in the glorious sunlight, and then when I tried to shift to get another angle on it, it was startled, did a little hop, and then tumbled off the rock, getting lost in the creeping myrtle of the rock garden. It emerged and flew away, so I never got the dorsal view, but here's today's Backyard Bug of the Day:
A beautiful, mostly cooperative six-spotted tiger beetle!
I didn't find very many bugs today, unless you count the 85,000,000,000,000,000,000 gypsy moth caterpillars. THEY ARE EVERYWHERE! Supposedly they prefer to eat oak leaves, but in my backyard they are on pretty much everything, including the blueberry bush. And they are raining down frass all the time - I have started wearing a hat for my bug walks to avoid getting caterpillar poop in my hair, and a little while ago I discovered that I had some in there anyway! And they dangle from the trees...
This is what I am dealing with, people! They are EVERYWHERE! So much for "If we get a lot of rain in May, they will die." Well, thanks for that, State Entomologist, it rained a LOT in May, and it doesn't appear to have bothered the little creeps one bit!
Honestly, one of the beautiful things about having been in the UK last month was going almost 3 weeks without seeing any gypsy moth caterpillars. Or ticks, but that's another story.
Anyway, here's the other insects I found:
Beetle on clematis flower
Assassin bug. I wish they would assassinate the gypsy moth caterpillars.
I think this might be a pistol case bearing caterpillar, so called because its case looks kind of like a pistol.
Tiny bee
I used to think sow bugs were pill bugs, but apparently those are two separate things. I remember seeing pill bugs when I was a kid, but in my yard I have only ever seen sow bugs. Until today:
I deliberately poked it with a piece of grass to see if this was, indeed, a pill bug. Yup.
Checking to see if the coast is clear...
It scurried away too fast for a good picture.
Some kind of nymph. this is one of those things that is so small that I wouldn't have seen it if it wasn't moving.
Eight-spotted forester moth. This is as close as I could get. So uncooperative.
One of those tiny flies that do that wing dance.
Arachnid Appreciation:
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I found another tiny green spider; this one has stripes. They could both still be the same species, though, male and female. I found both on cedar trees, and what's interesting is that they are about the same size and color as the berries (are they berries?) on the trees, so they blend in really well. I have never seen them before this week, but maybe I have been seeing them without seeing them, if you know what I mean. So pretty.
Jumping spider with prey
At first I thought it was a lady beetle, but it looks like it was actually some kind of Hemiptera.
I think this is a six-spotted orb weaver (today's blog is all about the numbers of spots - six, eight, six... beetle, moth, spider...)
This is what it did when I touched the leaf where its web was. Spiders sometimes pull their legs in to look small, like the way toddlers think if they crouch down and close their eyes you can't see them.
*Jabberwocky, by Lewis Carroll
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