Rafts

Hello again, it's been a while, hasn't it? I haven't done a bug walk in ages, for reason ranging from weather, to illness, to just not feeling like it. I've had a lot to do with the holidays, and the days are very short, which didn't give me a lot of daylight hours to squeeze in bug hunting. I know they were out there, because I have seen them, mostly springtails and winter crane flies, but since I don't want to just post pictures of the same things every day, I just didn't. I realize there is always a chance of finding something unexpected and maybe even amazing if I go out and really look, but there is a much bigger chance that I'm just going to see one winter crane fly. So, I have spent my time on other things, but more on that in a bit.

One of the other things I have been spending my time on has been walks in the woods, and I don't usually bring my real camera with me on those walks. However, yesterday on my walk I saw something that made me wish I had it, so today I took another walk, and brought my camera with my macro lens in the hopes that I would see the same thing, and I was successful.

In our woods there are a few streams and a pond, and on the surface of the waters these last two days I saw a lot of this:

 HUGE numbers of springtails. If you look carefully, on the lower left you can see there's more than one species here. The round, yellow ones dominated everywhere, but there were a few random members of other species.

 There were these rafts of them on the stiller areas of streams.

 Toward the upper right corner you can see another species.

 They appear to have molted en masse, with their exuvia (the shed skins) left behind on the surface of the water. If you look closely you can also see some much smaller ones.

 On the surface of the pond they were mostly more spread out.

 Interesting things here are the other species in the upper right, and also that you can see the "springs" of some of them. They look like kind of a forked tail at their back end. Usually it is tucked up under their bodies, and they use it to push themselves off into the air when they spring. I didn't see any of them springing today, though. They didn't even do what I usually see them doing, which is clumping together and then pushing away. They just all huddled together like this on the water.

 Again, the white things are exuvia.

 Near the lower left there is a fly or bee, or something very not a springtail.

As for other bugs...

 This is not a bug. This is the skull of a raccoon that died a few months ago. When we found it it still had skin on its head, though not much hair. The bones are much cleaner now, and more spread out on the forest floor, and I saw a couple of bugs on one of them. They scurried off before I could look closely or get a picture. They looked like flies, but they could have been beetles.

I actually saw a fair number of insects in the woods today, besides the springtails. Mostly winter crane flies, but I think maybe other things, too. I saw something scurry across the leaf litter that was probably a spider. And this:

Winter ant.

Now, one of the other things I have been doing with my time lately is working on new calendars for the coming year. There are seven:
Insects: Great and Small
Tiny Wildlife: Insects
It's the Beetles
Caterpillars
Eight-legged Wonders: Spiders
Dragonflies
Gone to Seed This one is actually of flower seeds, not insects, but it's cool, so check it out.

It's supposed to rain for the next two days, so this is probably going to be my last blog post of 2019, so... Thanks for checking out my backyard bugs this year. Have a Happy New Year!