The Bugs in the Backyard: Among the Milkweed

I feel like I have too many themes I could talk about today, and don't know where to begin. Also, I have a lot more pictures than I have had most other days lately, so this could take a while. So maybe I'll just jump right in with a visitor in my house last night.
Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

Last night as I was closing up the house to go to bed I saw a light blinking on the floor by the back door. A firefly had crawled under the screen door and was flashing its light. There are a couple of tricky things about taking pictures of fireflies, and two of them are focus and timing. The light of the insect was just enough that you can see a bit of its legs over its light organ.

Eventually I turned on the light to have a look at it, and saw it was lying on its back. I don't know why. I could speculate that it is a female, and that this is a species in which the females sit on the ground and signal to the males, which fly around, and that this posture is meant to make the light more visible, but that would just be a guess. I have no actual knowledge on the subject. However, it would blink forever in vain if it stayed in the house, so I moved it to the back porch.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

I almost walked right on by this one. It blended in really well on this grass head.

Katydid nymph

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #3:

Some kind of Hemiptera nymph. It looks a bit like its exoskeleton is missing a bit, and I wonder if it is getting ready to molt.

I saw at least seven, and possibly as many as nine species of butterflies today. I didn't get pictures of the flashy ones: eastern tiger swallowtail, another swallowtail, a probable monarch that zoomed right around me and without me being able to get a clear enough look to identify it, and something else that zipped past–butterflies can fly surprisingly fast–so quickly that I couldn't even guess what it might be. Here are the ones I did photograph:

Small wood satyr

Some kind of skipper

Cabbage white

Silver spot skipper

Note the "silver" spot that give it its name. Notice also that most of these were on milkweed flowers. I have two milkweed patches in my backyard, and both were teeming with life. Mostly bees, but quite a lot of skipper butterflies, mostly the small brown one above, but it could have been multiple species for all I know.

A couple of years ago the milkweed flowers in my backyard attracted so many different kinds of insects that on this blog I had a daily feature of the bugs on the milkweed. Today I figure I should revive it for at least one day. In addition to the butterflies above, Today On the Milkweed:

Plume moth. I used to find a lot of these on milkweed, up to a dozen on a single plant, but for some reason for the last couple of years they haven't really been around. Twice in the last week I have found solitary ones, though.

Hoverfly

Lots of bees, of course, mostly bumblebees:

This one has collected quite a bit of pollen in its pollen baskets, which I prefer to call pollen pants.

Honeybee

Fly. This past week was Pollinators Week, which I never managed to observe on the blog, but this is a good chance to point out, at least, that it's not just bees that pollinate plants.

Lady beetle. This one would not have been feeding on the plant itself, but looking for aphids feeding on the plant.

Let's see, what else have I got for today... Backyard Amphibian of the Day:

Other Bugs:

Robber fly

I have seen these slightly odd "inchworms" on the sassafrass trees in front of the house a lot lately, and today I found one on the tulip tree. I finally got around to looking it up, and it is called Tulip-Tree Beauty:

I assume the name refers to its preferred host plant (though it has others, including sassafras, which I had already figured out) and the physical appearance of the moth it will develop into, though I don't think the moth is a beauty. It's not the usual drab brown, it's a patterned white and brown.

Anyway, the caterpillar is strangely proportioned. That, however, made it easy to find in the caterpillar guide, and funnily enough, the book (Caterpillars of Eastern North America by David L. Wagner) describes it as "not likely to be confused with any other in our fauna." How refreshing, considering that so many other caterpillars are hard to distin