The nights are getting noisy. In June and July it's an insect light show with the fireflies, but right now it's a cacophony of crickets and katydids. We had a dinner picnic in the woods a couple of nights ago, and I think the insects were louder than the highway that runs along the edge of our woods. Lately I have been seeing crickets of different kinds, generally when I don't have a camera on hand–this is definitely their time to perform. Today I happened to see a couple while I was sitting on my back porch steps eating my lunch (there is a storm door on the picnic table. Don't ask me why), and my camera was beside me, so I tried to get pictures. The crickets weren't that interested, but I got what I could, so...
Backyard Bug of the Day:
Cricket. Juvenile, which you can tell from the underdeveloped wings. I think it is a species of bush cricket, but because it's a juvenile I can't definitively identify it from books. But let's be real, we all know I am too lazy to look it up.
I did so sort of a bug walk today, even though I had a lot of work to do, my knee was hurting so much it was hard to walk around the backyard (I didn't even do a woods walk today), and it was totally overcast, so it was really dark for taking pictures. So, here are a few Other Bugs:
Another monarch hatched today:
It's so small that even when I was looking for it I almost didn't see it. I have been checking this leaf for the last few days to see if the egg was still there, after seeing the butterfly lay it sometime last week. This is the second picture I took, after it had crawled an inch or so from where it hatched...
... and this is the first one (taken a couple of hours earlier) obviously very soon after it hatched. You can see the remains of the egg; the first thing monarch hatchlings do after they emerge from the egg is to eat the egg "shell."
Sadly, I could not find any other eggs today, and have still not found any caterpillars past their first instar. The one I found last week disappeared. Things I have read on the internet made me feel that I was doing more harm than good in raising the monarch butterflies in the house for a few years, so I didn't adopt any of these eggs or caterpillars, but could I really do any worse than nature is doing, when every egg and young caterpillar is eaten or killed within days?
A nearby danger to the monarch hatchling–a red milkweed beetle. The beetle eats milkweed leaves, and if there happens to be an egg or a tiny caterpillar on the leaf, they might get eaten, too. But I do not blame the beetle. It is just trying to survive. And larger monarch caterpillars pose the same danger to eggs or tiny caterpillars. Ultimately, it is humans that are responsible for the dwindling of the monarch butterfly species to such perilously low numbers. And if the best I can do for them is to provide milkweed, which is also food for so many other insects, then I will keep doing it.
Wasp.
Japanese beetles
Arachnid Appreciation:
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