Life in the Litter

I don't do much real gardening in my backyard, and now that I know that leaf litter is an important habitat for many species, not just of insects, but other animals, too, to overwinter in we don't even do a lot of raking. I do try to clean up certain areas, though, mostly trying to remove invasive species in the hopes that I can get something else to grow there. Today I was doing just that, and found something that had chosen to bed down in the leaf litter.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I tried to look up this moth, but it wasn't in my books. It's one I have always thought was very pretty. Most of the times I have seen them they have been on the front porch, attracted to the light. I spied this one as it scooted between a couple of leaves that were disturbed by my gardening efforts; I was trying to pull up an invasive vine by the roots. I am glad I didn't squash the moth, and after I took its picture I moved it to a safer spot where I had already finished weeding. And this is why you should try to leave at least some leaf litter in your yard if you can. It's home for a lot of things.

 I love the look of Lepidoptera wings.

Backyard Bird of the Day:

 I am not even going to try to look this up. My bird book has a couple of pages of "Confusing Fall Warblers," species of warblers that apparently look different in the fall than the rest of the year, and most of the warblers on the other pages all look more or less the same. This is migration time, I guess, and there were a lot of small birds flitting around the trees in the backyard today. I only got glimpses of them. It was nice to have them around.

Other Bugs:

 Crane fly on the garden shed.

 I've been finding a lot of little moths like this lately, many of them on the garden shed. This one looks like it has different markings than the others, though, so it might be a different species.

 A lot of winter fireflies out today.

I spotted this chrysalis:

 There were two leaves stuck together along their edges, and in the space where they were attached this chrysalis was poking out from between them. It's sometimes hard to tell if a chrysalis is still occupied, or if its occupant has eclosed and flown away...

 ... but when I moved the leaf to try to get a better angle for the picture it moved, so I know there is still a pupa in there. It still fascinates me that they react to stimuli. I mean, what's the point? They can't get away if a predator comes along. It's cool, though.

I have been reading a novel called Early Riser by Jasper Fforde, and it is about a sort of alternate version of life on earth in which people hibernate during the winter. They mostly spend the winter in buildings called dormitoria, which are sort of round, tower-like apartment buildings. There are people who stay awake all winter, though, to look after things like the nuclear power generators. There was one tree in my backyard today that reminded me of the book; the tree, a roundish, towering structure, probably a lot of things sleeping somewhere inside it, and yet on the outside are all of the insects that are still awake:

 Tree cricket

 

 Probably the same cricket and winter firefly that were close by each other yesterday, only today they were closer and had switched sides.

And there were other winter fireflies there, too (and they really do kind of correlate with the characters in the book who stay awake when everyone else is hibernating).

 I didn't notice it when I took the picture, but there's something else there, too. Can you spot it?

 Pupating micromoth in its pupal case made of bits cut out of leaves.

I spotted three bristletails near each other on the foundation of the house:

 Case bearing moth/bagworm(?)

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Spiders and caterpillars both make silk, and both dangle from silk lines from things, and both leave those lines dangling there sometimes. Other things get caught on the lines, so sometimes I'll see something dangling and am not sure what it is, particularly if it's really small. Is it a spider? Or is it just a bit of plant debris? This one, as I think you can see, I figured out was a spider.

Here's a closer look at it, no longer dangling.