Anticipating Future Fruits

Springtime feels like a constant state of anticipation. Waiting for leaves, waiting for flowers, waiting for what comes next, waiting for days that aren't cold, waiting for the eggs to hatch in the wrens' nest in the bucket on the back porch so I can stop worrying about frightening the birds off their eggs (they have hatched, I think Friday or Saturday of last week)...

And with some of those flowers, there is waiting for the fruit that will follow. Backyard Blooms of the Day:

Blossoms on a wild blueberry bush in the woods. They are smaller than the flowers on the cultivated blueberry bush in my backyard, and I wonder if that means that the berries will be smaller. No doubt the cultivated ones are cultivated for large fruit.

There's still water in the big pond, and today there were a couple of frogs that were peeping out of the water, and were not frightened away when I leaned over to take their pictures. Backyard Amphibians of the Day:

As I write this I have still not decided which insect to choose as Backyard Bug of the Day, so I am just going to start posting the pictures, and maybe something will strike me and the right one...

 I wasn't planning to do a bug walk today because of other things I had to do, but I found something interesting, so I decided to take my camera out as part of my woods walk, and start by doing a bit of a bug walk in my regular backyard. I ended up taking a walk of over two hours. It was wonderful.

Here's the interesting thing I spotted:

Sawfly larva. I noticed leaf damage on the leaves of a tree, and recognized it as sawfly larva damage. Right now the larvae are tiny enough that you only see them if you look for them, and I looked for them because I saw the damaged leaves.

Pair of weevils

Stilt bug

Lace bug

There were a lot of bees and flies on the garlic mustard again. I only managed to get decent photos of one of them:

 

Stinkbug

Weevil

March fly:

Those big eyes that make up pretty much its entire head show that it is a male.

Okay, I have decided. This is today's Backyard Bug of the Day:

Some kind of fly. I think it was hanging out looking for a mate. It has extremely long front legs, and interesting golden-shimmery wings. And it's quite small. And possibly a new species for me.

Stonefly. I think this is a different species than the ones I saw all winter. It's bigger than those were.

Click beetle

I saw an incredible number of spiders today, of many different species. However, between their shyness and the breeze that wouldn't allow the necessary moments of stillness to photograph webs, I only got a few pictures for Arachnid Appreciation:

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This is my favorite picture of the day. Two spiders of different species staring each other down on a leaf. Or rather, they were staring each other down until I came along and distracted the jumping spider so it turned to look at me instead (and then wandered off to the other side of the leaf).

Bowl and doily spider

Also a bowl and doily spider