The Bugs in the Backyard: Identification

When we purchased the land to build our house we then had to wait over three years to actually start building, but we still spent a lot of time here. We were living in an apartment, and had no backyard, so we spent those three plus years treating our building lot as a backyard, albeit one we had to drive across town to spend time in. We did spent some time clearing to build the house, and doing other work, like building the stone steps that lead up from the street, but we spent a lot of time just hanging out and enjoying the space. One of the things I did was buy a wildflower field guide, and identify all of the wildflowers that were growing here. I kept a list at the time, but I don't know where it is, and I don't remember how many flowers were on it. I want to say around 50, but that seems like a lot. I never bothered to learn how to identify trees, though. I love trees, but identifying them somehow didn't seem as necessary to me as knowing the names of the flowers. I learned black birch, which is the dominant tree species on the property; I knew oaks and maples, though not specific species, and I knew sassafras, and once it bloomed, dogwood. To this day I don't know what the rest of them are. There is one species, though, that I know as a host plant for lace bugs. I think it's kind of funny that I know that about the tree, and recognize the various ones around the yard as being that species of tree, and being a place where I can find lace bugs, but I don't know what kind of tree it is. There's another one, too, that I know only as the tree species where candy striped leaf hoppers sun themselves on warmer winter days. It's a tree that's all over the woods of our new acres, but I still only know that fact about them, not what it is called. For the purposes of a person who goes outside every day looking for bugs, even in the winter, knowing what trees I might find bugs on is more important than knowing the names of the trees.

The point is, I found a lace bug on its host plant. But I don't know what the tree is called.

And speaking of bugs and host plants...

This is an oak leaf, and some kind of insect has rolled itself up in part of the leaf. Last year I happened to find out what kind of bug does this to oak leaves, but now I can't remember what it was, or where I read about it. So all I know is, there is an insect larva in there.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Grasshopper nymph. First of the season.

Other Bugs:

Aphids

Sawfly larvae

Another species of aphid

Whenever I have to empty the rain gauge I look underneath to see if anything is hiding there. It is a pretty popular hiding spot for insects, and more often spiders. We haven't had any rain for a while, until we got about 1.25 inches yesterday, and when I looked underneath I found the first of several spiders for today's Arachnid Appreciation:.
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