Waiting to Fly

I don't have a Backyard Bug of the Day today, and I didn't do a bug walk. It rained all day, as predicted, so I couldn't take the camera out. So, why am I posting a blog, you ask? Because there were bugs inside my house.

Specifically, a butterfly:

 The butterfly that I expected to emerge yesterday morning finally eclosed some time between midnight and 1 a.m. This was obviously not an ideal time to release him outside. But today was not a good day to release a butterfly at all, since it rained all day. I didn't think I should keep him until tomorrow, though, and it's supposed to rain all day tomorrow, too. So I brought him out to the back porch and put him on the back porch tree where he could be somewhat sheltered and decide for himself when it was time to fly. As of shortly before midnight tonight he was still there. That's a longer time than usual for a butterfly to just hang around (though they do sometimes do so all night, as happened with the last one I released), but like I said, it rained all day. I will be interested to see what it does tomorrow.

It had a deformed wing, too.

I don't think this will prevent it from flying. I have had a butterfly before with a deformed wing, much worse than this, and she was able to fly just fine.

 He did make one very clumsy test flight down onto the porch, but often those first flights are awkward.

 When I retrieved him from the floor he started crawling up my arm.

 I am not sure, but I think that monarch butterflies born around now are the migrating generation that will be flying to Mexico for the winter. He's got a long way to go with that wing.

 

We went out this evening and came home to find this moth on the porch.

 

 The only other bug I have today is this, which I think is a bristletail, found in the basement. Sorry for the bad picture, it was taken while the bristletail was inside the bug vacuum. More on that in a moment...

 Arachnid Appreciation:
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 I had to go down to the basement to get something today and found this on the basement door. It's a cool spider, but bigger than I like to have wandering around my house, so I went to get the bug vacuum to catch it to bring it outside.

Before I could catch the spider I spotted the bristletail above, and sucked that up, too. I felt a little bad for the bristletail, being in there with the spider, but it was the most efficient way to get them both. However, it was not a problem. This terrible shot shows the bristletail walking right under the spider, and the the spider didn't react at all.

 The other spider I have almost came into the house on a box that had been in the package bin. The package bin is full of spiders. Now there is one fewer spider in there; I found it on the box before I went into the house, and released it on the front porch (and then went to get my camera to take this picture, which shows the spider hiding in some leftover birds' nest debris from when robins built a nest on the porch earlier in the year. The front porch really could use a good sweeping).