On the Road

Oof, it's been a long day. I had to get up early to do my bug walk–not that it felt early, it was already hot and humid outside. The reason I had to get my bug walk done early is because we left today on a trip, so this will be the last blog for a few weeks. I've got someone watching over my backyard for me, but they won't be watching over the blog, so for the next few weeks you're going to have to go outside and have a look around if you want to see bugs.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Damselfly

Here's how the caterpillars look now:

 I am so sad I am going to miss them becoming butterflies!

 I didn't realize when I took the picture that the lens was foggy! I had just walked out of the cool, dry house into the hot, humid backyard. Wedge shaped beetle or tumbling flower beetle. I don't have my books with me to look it up.

 Plant bug on common mullein

 I think this is some kind of underwing moth. This is as close as I got.

 Caterpillar

 There is a new round of sawfly larvae around.

 Plume moth

 Flower fly, I think.

 I am not sure what is happening here, but it looks like a wasp laying eggs on a leaf with sawfly larvae. There were several leaves with this scenario playing out, but I didn't see any eggs.

Flower beetles on common mullein:

 Assassin bug nymph

Different species of assassin bug nymph.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Spined micrathena

Look Closely

It's funny how often I don't see things when I am looking through my camera. It happens quite a bit that while I am taking a picture of one bug I fail to notice another elsewhere in the picture. When I am focusing my camera I am very focused on one thing, and will often miss a little detail on the edge of things. Today's version of that is a little bit extreme, though:

 As it turns out, there are three baby robins in the nest. I have only ever noticed two, even when I took this picture that shows there are three.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Some kind of Hemiptera nymph. I don't know what it is, but it's kind of intriguing.

It was extremely hot and humid today, so it is fitting that what I saw most of bug-wise was sweat bees:

 I only got pictures of two, but I saw a lot more.

 Tiny moth

 

 Plant bug

 And is that some kind of insect egg?

 So far I have seen a LOT of male gypsy moths, and only four females; here are two of the females I have seen, both laying eggs.

 Leaf footed bug nymph

 Moth

 Robber fly

Arachnid Appreciation:

This jumping spider was on the table on the back porch. It seemed to be trying to feed on the remains of a couple of the katydids that had fallen there from the wasp nest above. Most of them are gone now, I presume having been taken by something, a bird, maybe. They remained basically paralyzed but alive for several days after I found them. Anyway, there are two left, and they are clearly dead, but this spider seemed to be trying to feed on them.

There were also a bunch of really tiny somethings scurrying around, and the spider kept running at them. I couldn't tell if it caught any, they were so small.

Here's what they look like.

A Noise in the Backyard

I heard a silly poem today that made mention of a butterfly's silent flight, and my first thought was that butterflies don't fly silently. The flapping of their wings makes a sound. I heard it just this afternoon when a butterfly flew right past my head, and I noted to myself how much I enjoy, for some reason, the fact that you can hear a butterfly's wings flap. So it's funny that a few hours later I heard that poem, and knew that the poet had never really been close to a butterfly in flight. There's that whole scenario of the butterfly effect, in which a butterfly flaps its wings and sets off a chain of events that carries around the whole world, and I don't think that's really happening, but you can certainly hear it if you are quiet and a butterfly flies right past you. I've never liked poetry much anyway.

The butterfly in question:

I didn't get to do my full bug walk today because a thunderstorm rolled in, but I found enough to satisfy me.


Backyard Bug of the Day:

 This is a fruit fly. It happens to be one of my favorite species of fly. I can't believe I just wrote that, but it's true.

 Look at those eyes!

 Look at them!

 But what I like about it is that its wings look like a starry sky.

Late last night as I was working on my computer I happened to catch a glimpse of a tiny bug on the desk, which at first I thought was a fly. As annoying as it is to have flies in the house, I panicked a little when I looked closer and saw what it really was:

 A tiny cricket. And why would I panic about a tiny cricket in my house? Because tiny crickets can make a LOT of noise, and are nearly impossible to find, especially in my house, which has weird acoustics that make it difficult to figure out where sounds originate. I quickly grabbed my bug vacuum and captured it. Then because I didn't feel like going outside at the moment, I set it aside. Foolish. Later I happened to look inside to have a look at my captive and it wasn't there. It couldn't figure out how it had escaped until I saw that the holes that air passes through when it sucks insects inside are a little bit large on the edges of the machine, and this cricket was tiny, and so it was able to pass through the holes. That meant it was somewhere inside the mechanism. Great. No way to get it out. I set it down and went back to work, and a few minutes later happened to glance down and saw that the cricket had gotten out of the machine and was now on the floor. I quickly vacuumed it up again, took this picture, and brought it right outside. A lesson for you about not procrastinating.

The parent robins seem to have mellowed with this brood, like typical second-time parents. They don't get as upset when I peek at the nest. They perch nearby and chirp at each other, but they haven't been squawking at me and diving at me... Until today. They didn't dive at me, but suddenly, after weeks of not caring (and I was being careful to keep my distance, but not that much distance), today they were very vocal about their disapproval of me being in that part of the backyard.

The babies look like they are close to being ready to fledge.

I think there are two of them. That is all I have ever seen, anyway. If there is a third, it's not visible from where I peek at them from.

I have mentioned skeletonizers before, insects that eat a leaf in such a way as to leave the veining behind. Well, this is the most incredibly skeletonized leaf I have ever seen:

It's 3 dimensional. There's a front and back and they have been separated so there's a space in between. Extraordinary.

Other Bugs:

 Red milkweed beetle.

With ant photobomber

The other day I mentioned that I had not seen many beetles in the backyard, but today there were quite a few of them.

Not sure if this is a species of firefly or not. But it's a beetle.

This is the best look I got at this, but it's a beetle.

I think this might be a fourteen spotted lady beetle...

... and this is a twenty-spotted lady beetle.

This beetle is crawling on the corpse of a squished gypsy moth caterpillar. I don't know if it was eating it.

The possibly brown hooded owlet moth caterpillar

Notice the white fluff on the vine behind these hopper nymphs. I think that is another species of hopper nymph.

And another hopper nymph.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Orchard spider