The Bugs in the Backyard: Playing Pretend

I went outside tonight to look at the stars and was amazed at how loud it was outside. I can hear the crickets and katydids from inside when the windows are open, but going outside made me realize how incredibly loud they are. And there are so many of them! The sound come from everywhere, and even with my poor insect-sound identification skills I could pick out at least 2 species of crickets and 2 of katydids. It was an extraordinary cacophony. I tried to imagine sleeping outside in a tent amidst all of that, and decided that you probably couldn't. And people think cities are noisy! It's weird how little of it filters into the house; through the bedroom window it just sounds like pleasant summer sounds. It's a whole different experience to step outside. Even at night, it's worth going outside to appreciate the life that's teeming out there.

It's ironic, too, that I was standing out there obviously surrounded by multitudes of insects because when I did my bug walk this afternoon I hardly found any. Yes, there were a lot of bees on the Japanese knotweed, but they were too fast and busy to photograph. And there were ants and bees on the milkweed plants, but I can't take pictures of the same things all the time. I had company on my bug walk today, and so I think though I knew I wasn't finding much I didn't realize how little I found until I uploaded my pictures and saw that there were only 13 of them. And 6 of those were of a frog. And two of them were taken in my dining room. Obviously, I was distracted by having someone I was chatting with along on my walk. And it WAS another very hot, humid day, which the bugs don't seem to like. But how could I have taken only 5 pictures on my bug walk?!?

And yet, I think I have a new species for Backyard Bug of the Day:

I may have seen this before, I am not sure, though. My niece, who was out walking with me, gets the credit for spotting this one. She asked what it was, and I said a wasp, and wasn't going to bother trying to get a picture of it because I thought it would fly away, but I decided to try anyway, and when I looked at it through the macro lens I realized that it was not a wasp, but actually a wasp-mimicking moth. I was unable to identify the exact species from my books. The giveaway that it is just a moth pretending to be a wasp and not a real wasp is the feathery antennae. Their is an obvious reason to pretend that you are a wasp if you are in fact a harmless moth, which is, of course, that everyone thinks you can sting them so they leave you alone. [Edit: I didn't find it in my books–any of them–but I did find it on the internet, and according to the internet it is a raspberry crown borer moth, male].

Other Bugs:

3 of the 13 pictures I took were of this assassin bug. I was curious about what it was doing; it feeds on insects, not plants, but it appeared to be probing into (or between) the flowers and buds of this autumn joy sedum, but I did not see any other insect there that it could have been trying to feed on.