Night Lights

Many a summer's evening in my childhood was spent gamboling around the backyard at dusk in pursuit of fireflies. Dusk is the easiest time to catch them, because you can see well enough to run around, and once you've spotted one lit up you can still see its silhouette in the not-quite-dark light to be able to follow it and catch it. I was thinking about this the other night as I was standing on my back porch watching the fireflies. It's not such an unusual thing to remember things from long past and think that they were different than the way things are now, and I kind of feel like that's the case with the fireflies; the ones here don't seem to start lighting up until it's darker, and they mostly flit about the tops of the trees, instead of at kid height above the lawn. My backyard then had more lawn and fewer trees, so maybe they did behave differently then. But it is possible that they were a different species of firefly. I do live in a different area of the country than I did then, and I never really looked that hard at what the fireflies looked like as beetles. I was only interested in the light, even when we had twenty of them in a jar and could look at them up close as they crawled up the glass (we always let them go before we went inside). One thing I am pretty sure about is that never during my childhood did I ever see a firefly during the daytime, and if I did, I am not positive that I would have realized what it was, and might even have squished it, because I thought all bugs were gross (except, obviously, while catching fireflies. Funny how much they didn't really seem like bugs when their green lights danced across the twilight).

Now, though, I look more closely at insects, and I know what a firefly looks like in the daytime. However, my first picture of today's Backyard Bug of the Day is one I took at dusk, when it was almost completely dark (and the mosquitoes were definitely active). Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Okay, not a great picture. But... you can see the firefly. It was darker than the picture implies; I had it on a long exposure.

Actually none of the daytime pictures are great, either, and normally I wouldn't award Backyard Bug of the Day status on the basis of pictures like these, but it's pretty unusual for me to find a firefly during the day (yes, I know, this is the second time this week), so I am taking advantage of the opportunity. It's not my fault the bug wouldn't sit still. Well, actually, yes, it is my fault, but I couldn't help it.

 Nice look at the glowing apparatus. I am sure there is a name for that...

 This is when it landed on my monopod. I was able to take my camera off and get this shot before it flew away... and landed on my shirt.

 Thrips again, either a different species than the other day, or more mature ones.

 The paler one is more like the ones from the other day.

 

 Sometimes I take pictures of bugs without even trying. Or without even knowing. I didn't see the bugs when I took the picture, only when I looked at it on the computer. Can you see them?

More thrips!

 Damselfly

 Same one. I couldn't decide whether to post the one with the natural setting, or the one that's a better picture of the damselfly, so you're getting both.

 I tried to look this up, but there are a couple of bugs that look kind of like this, and none that look exactly like this in the book. I can narrow it down to Plant Bug in the order Hemiptera

Some kind of cocoon

 It looks like something has laid eggs on it

 Skipper with wings up...

 ... and wings open. I used to think that these were called skippers because they look like sailboats when they sit on leaves like this, but apparently the name has to do with the way they fly. And I don't think a skipper is a kind of sailboat anyway. But it should be.

 Leaf hopper

Egg sac, I think