That's Not Rain

If you were to stand outside on my front porch in the dark right now you would think that it was steadily raining, but you would not smell the petrichor (the smell of rain on hot ground), not because it's not hot out (it is. Oh, it is), but because it's not raining. What you'd be hearing is the patter of frass from thousands of gypsy moth caterpillars methodically destroying the trees in front of my house. And what you would smell is not rain on a hot night, but caterpillar poop. Yes, there is enough of it on the ground that you can smell it. Yes, I know what caterpillar poop smells like. It's not even a bad smell, kind of mossy and musty, but it's gross when you know that that is what you're smelling.

But if you really want something gross, you'd have to go to my back porch, where there is a bucket full of dead caterpillars. Well, that's an exaggeration. There is a bucket half full of soapy water, with a whole lot of dead caterpillars in it. I didn't dump it out because I will probably want to kill more caterpillars tomorrow, and I don't want to have to waste water and soap when I do this every day. And I do this every day. When I want to be looking for interesting bugs instead I am killing horrible, destructive bugs. And I hate it. I feel awful, horrified when I am doing it. And my leg muscles are sore, because when I walk around the backyard and see caterpillars, the easiest way to kill them is to step on them (it's gross, and I hate it, but it's easiest), but how do you kill caterpillars on tree trunks? Well, you still step on them, basically, squishing them with your foot. Anything up to about shoulder height I can kill this way (yes, I can kick that high). See, the other way of killing them involves squishing them with a stick, and I don't always have a stick (I am NOT using my monopod), and the stick method is risky, because sometimes... well, never mind, it's too gross to tell you.

But when there is a huge mass of them like this:

 You just use a stick to knock them into a bucket of soapy water. This rock is under an oak tree. Every day the number of caterpillars on this rock increases. I kill them, but it doesn't matter. I can kill a million of them, but there will still be a billion of them. It's hopeless and depressing, and I am so mad at the entomologists who said that all that dreary rain we had would kill them when it didn't do a thing.

I cannot wait for this to end.

Every day of this heat wave (It's officially a heat wave as of today) I have gone out looking for bugs at a different time of day, and at no time have I found a lot of bugs. It's discouraging.

Still finding mostly bug youngsters today, starting with Backyard Bug of the Day:

I think this is some kind of sawfly larva.

 Tiny beetles on a daisy

 Some kind of Hemiptera nymph

 Beetle

 Case bearing caterpillar

 Geometer moth

 Some kind of hopper nymphs. The fluff is a waxy secretion.

Once again I resorted to the porch light to find more bugs. There was a LOT of them out there, but once again, not many of them would sit still to be photographed. Most of those that would were moths:

 

 

 Green lacewings

 Beetles

This one is kind of big for beetles around here.