At Last

 Even though I am not doing bug walks every day at this time, I do look for bugs when I go outside, and sometimes I look for specific bugs in places where I expect to find them at this time of year. There is a certain bug that I nearly always see on my clematis flowers climbing the arbor, and I have been looking for them in vain for a couple of weeks. The flowers are past their peak and I had nearly given up hoping to see one, but there it was today, at last, when I went out to get the mail.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Katydid nymph. This is one of my favorite backyard bugs.

For a couple of reasons, most having to do with the heat wave we've been riding for the last four days, we have been taking our woods walks after dark. The times have ranged from 8:00, when it's not dark yet, but will get dark while we're out there, to 11:00, when it is well and truly nighttime. These walks have been really buggy (and muggy), and I don't just mean that there have been a lot of mosquitoes. In addition to moths, which you would probably expect on a night hike, there have been a LOT of beetles, both terrestrial and aquatic (in what little water is left in the main stream), and last night a LOT of cockroaches (one of which crawled up my sleeve, which I did not appreciate). There were a lot of spiders, too, of a variety of species. After two nights of buggy night walks, tonight I brought my camera, and, of course, this was the least buggy of the walks. But it was still a nice (if extremely muggy) walk, with plenty of interesting bugs to see.

It wasn't dark yet when I found this one:

Lady beetle larva

We sat at the picnic table in the woods for a little while, and some insects, like this beetle, were attracted to the flashlights:

Last night we saw lots of cockroaches. Tonight we saw only two. They are particularly pretty when you see their fluttery flight in the beam of a flashlight.

Bad picture of a June bug, a species of beetle, on the underside of a leaf.

Lately we have been seeing quite a few toads and frogs in the woods:

The very common American toad

Due to the recent mayfly flights, I have often found spider webs that are built next to or right across the stream in order to catch the dancing mayflies. Some of those webs have been very successful, as we have seen them with multitudes of mayflies caught in them. The mayflies seem to be done, but the spiders are still building by the stream. Arachnid Appreciation:

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There were no bugs in this web, but it looked very new, and it wasn't there last night, so it must be tonight's web.

Several of the bugs we saw tonight on our walk were on this tree, and as we looked at them there were others that were flying around, including some that were annoying my husband. He chastised this spider for being lazy and not catching them.