Weirdness in the Night

I hope you had a happy Halloween, if you celebrated it, and a bit belatedly I am here to present some weird things I found in the dark of this Hallows Eve night.

Actually, I found this bit of weirdness first yesterday, in the daylight. We have some interesting fungi growing on one of the trails on our property:

I looked them up, they might be called veiled lady mushrooms, and they have a lacy skirt. when I saw one yesterday the skirt was kind of puffed out a bit, but the ones I saw tonight were less flamboyant. Still, they look really interesting...

Anyway, the ones I saw yesterday were broken, but on my night hike tonight I found some that were intact. And then, I found this one:

I don't know if the mushroom is oozing that stuff, if it's from some other plant, or if some animal came by after eating something that did not agree with them and, er... deposited something on this mushroom. And if that wasn't weird enough, it was covered with ants that clearly wanted whatever it is that is all over the mushroom. So, even though I was at the end of my walk, and it was eleven o'clock at night, I went in and got my camera to take some pictures.

This one has a shorter skirt. They all sort of look like they have layers of lace skirts, though.

Ants were not the only insects interested in the mushrooms:

Not only was this fly sitting right on top of one (obviously not the one with the weird, oozy stuff), but when I shone my flashlight on it there were lots of other flies and gnats flying around.
 

So, it's been a while since I have posted, and since I have done a bug walk. Mostly I just can't stand to be outside during the day, listening to chainsaws and backhoes. And then most of this last week it was raining. But yesterday evening during our woods walk I was really wishing I had my camera with me, because I saw a lot of insects and spiders in the woods. There was one sapling that I think had at least twenty spiders' webs in in, mostly tiny little spiders, and more than one species. I saw march flies, and caterpillars, moths, and bristletails... for a rainy evening in the upper 50s, it was surprisingly buggy in the woods. Since I was out with my camera tonight, I figured I might as well look around a bit to find some bugs; I knew there were plenty around because once again I had seen them on my walk, and I could hear a couple species of crickets. So, what did I see on my Backyard Bug Walk in the last, chilly hour of October?

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Springtail. Generally a common sight this time of year after there's been rain.

And there's hardly ever just one.

Other Bugs:

I saw a surprising number of leaf hoppers tonight:

Mostly candy-striped

And another member of the order Hemiptera, that would probably have liked to find one of those leaf-hoppers to prey on:

Assassin bug nymph

And, there were caterpillars out tonight:

 

Fittingly for Halloween, I found a lot of spiders in the backyard tonight for Arachnid Appreciation:

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An orb weaver, possibly a cross orb weaver. Her web was perfect when I spotted her, but a few seconds later an insect landed on it. She shook the web a bit, but did not go after the insect.

Then she crawled through the center of the web to the other side.

On my nighttime bug walks in the backyard I like to look up at the trees to find bugs. There are a lot of young trees with low branches, and there are a lot of insects that hide out on the underside of leaves. It's probably not something anyone afraid of spiders would like to think about as they walk under trees, but tonight I found spiders there:

Here's a closer look at that one.

Here's a closer look at that one, too.