This or That?

 Today I had time for one walk: bugs or woods. I chose woods. I brought my camera, and had to decide between macro lens and wide angle lens. I chose wide angle, because I wanted to get pictures of how green the woods are now...

... because the leaves have burst out in their glory this week, and today was a beautiful, sunshiny day. You can see that the trees are not fully leafed out, and some species have a long way to go, but suddenly the woods are all green and I love it. This is not a job for a macro lens. So I brought the wide angle, in part because I didn't expect to see many bugs, because I haven't seen many lately. You know how this story goes. Of course I saw lots and lots of bugs. I take pictures of bugs even when I am not trying to:

 I was just trying to take pictures of dogwood flowers. Instead I got a wasp, and if you look very hard, a gnat.

And I thought I was just taking a picture of a violet on a mossy rock in the middle of the stream:

... but I was also taking a picture of a stonefly, which I did not see until I saw it on my computer screen.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

The moth, not the ants.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

Leaf-footed bug. I think squash bug, which is a kind of leaf-footed bug, perhaps. I don't know, it's kind of confusing. The thing about common names is that not everyone agrees about what they are, and when things fall into more than one, based on species, genera (whatever that is)... It's a Hemiptera, that much I know.

When we bought our woods, we didn't end up really exploring most of it until the winter, even though we bought the property in the middle of summer. We didn't know where the boundaries were, and a lot of the part closest the house was pretty packed with vines and thorny shrubs. It took us a while to really get into the woods, and then we were surprised to see so little understory. As it turns out, much of the understory is ferns, which we didn't find out until they emerged last spring. And now they are emerging again:

Ferns are unfurling all over the forest floor.

I'm not feeling very optimistic about the fate of the salamander eggs. The rain this week has given them a reprieve, but unless we start to get more normal rain amounts this pond is not going to last long enough for them to hatch, much less live out their aquatic life stage:

Still nesting:

Mourning dove

Arachnid Appreciation:

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You can't see the other one, but there were a couple of spiders scurrying among the leaf litter here. It's quite usual, actually, that if I see one spider in the leaf litter there will be one or two others within about six inches.

I noticed the beetle before the spider. For the beetle's sake, I hope it notices the web. For the spider's sake, I hope it doesn't.