Cold and Dark

The temperature has dropped in the last couple of days, and the high today was in the low 60s, which is definitely chilly in comparison, but it's certainly not cold, so I found it strange that when I went out today I didn't find any insects at all. Not even wasps feeding on the grapes on the back porch tree. But when I got back from my second woods walk after it got dark, my husband spotted a caterpillar by the garden, so I went in and got my camera. Having my camera out, I figured I might as well look around a bit, and I found a surprising number of bugs just in the area around the garden and the back porch. 

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Weevil

 Here's the caterpillar my husband found:

 And here's a couple more I found on my brief, after-dark walk:

 

Tiny looper on goldenrod

Possibly the biggest looper I have ever seen, I think also on goldenrod (but obviously on the stem, not the flowers).

Sharpshooter, a larger species of leafhopper. These are usually very uncooperative and hard to photograph, but I think that this one was too cold to want to resist having its picture taken; the temperature was in the 50s by the time I took my camera out.

 

Some white flies:

These are so small that if you don't know what they are, you would not see them and think that you were looking at insects.

There were a lot of moths on the flowers, a couple of species, with multiple specimens of each:

 

I saw quite a few spiders, mostly tiny and/or lurking in hiding. Arachnid Appreciation:

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Nursery web spider

Flower crab spider

I found this beautiful little spider...

... in a tree. It was so small, and just high enough that I couldn't get close with my camera, so here's a zoom-in view.

Like I said, lurking...

Nursery web spider