Nature is Fascinating

 Often lately when I do a bug walk I have plenty of time, and don't see a lot of bugs. Today I didn't have enough time (although I thought I did, I had more than 2 hours!), but there were bugs everywhere! The number of bugs I saw is not reflected in the number of pictures I have, or the number of kinds of bugs I saw. There were a lot of bugs zooming around, either in the air, or near the ground. It was fascinating to walk through the woods and see bees and flies everywhere around me. I thought as I walked, about the statistic I have read many times that if you put all of the insects in the world on one side of a giant balance, and all of the other animals on the other side, the insects would tip the balance their way, because as tiny as they are, there are so many of them that they have more mass than all of the other animals in the world. I had the crazy thought that I had probably seen enough insects today to out-mass me, but I don't think that's actually true. Just fun to think about. But bugs zooming around aren't bugs I can photograph.

Not that I didn't try:

This is the best shot I got of this bee (actually, I think it might be a male velvet ant. Which is actually a kind of wasp. The males have wings, but the females are wingless, and look like they are covered in velvet, hence the name. But don't touch them, because they have an incredibly painful sting, reportedly. Ants, bees, and wasps are in the same order Hymenoptera, which is why they are so similar. Or rather, they are in the same order because they are so similar. But I digress...). At that point I reminded myself not to waste time on exercises in futility and moved on.

I got buzzed by a lot of fairly large bugs, flying so fast that I couldn't even tell what they were. I saw at least 6 species of butterflies, I think. And I thought I was going to have a repeat of yesterday's experience in finding a Backyard Bug of the Day. I ate my lunch outside, and as I was returning my dishes to the house I saw a cool stinkbug on the trunk of a tree. I figured I would go inside and get my camera and get ready for my walk, and I would come back out and take a picture of the stinkbug. Unlike the grasshopper from yesterday, I was pretty sure the stinkbug would still be in the exact same spot–it wasn't an unreasonable expectation, like with the grasshopper. So, I got ready for my walk, grabbed my camera, and went outside... and the stinkbug was gone. I looked all around the tree trunk; it had flown away. Well, I had not trouble finding other bugs to be Backyard Bug of the Day. In fact, I found four.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

This is a new species of click beetle for me, and new species automatically get to be Backyard Bug of the Day. It's a fairly large species of click beetle. I wish I had been able to get a better picture, but it was in an awkward spot. Still, it's pretty cool.

I saw a couple of other click beetles, too:

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

Just kidding. I got a better picture of it than this.

This was a pretty cooperative butterfly. Landed almost right in front of me, let me get close enough to take this...

It was not as cooperative when I tried to get the dorsal view.

I failed in my attempt to look this up. I really need to get a butterfly field guide... Anyway, this was MUCH more cooperative than any of the other butterflies I saw. Most of them I didn't get a chance to take any pictures at all. And then there was this one:

See what I mean?

Here's a tiny hint. It's either a question mark or a comma, a point of punctuation and confusion that always amuses me.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #3:

Some kind of larva in the stream. This was actually in the water; it's unusual for me to see insects (larval or otherwise) during the day; usually I see them only on night hikes. I think this might be a mayfly larva. While their adult lives are very short, lasting only about a day (we've recently gone over this), they live as larvae for a couple of years.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #4:

Caddisfly. After seeing caddisfly larvae in the stream all winter, I can't help but wonder if I happened to see this insect as a larva, and am now seeing it as an adult. There is no way for me to know that, of course, but it's fun to think about. This is one of the bugs that zoomed past me as I was walking in along the path; as I usually do I watched to see if it would land, and unlike the other bugs that buzzed me today, I was able to see where this one alit, and it did not fly away when I went over to take its picture. In fact, in this shot I had picked up the stick it landed on so I could get a better shot of it than I could with it lying on the ground.

So, that was a lot of Backyard Bugs of the Day, but it couldn't be helped. All four of those were too good not to feature. So here's all the other bugs that I was able to photograph today, a tiny fraction of the ones I saw:

This bug was flying around above the surface of the water and suddenly crashed down on the water surface. It was not a graceful landing, but it pulled itself out. No idea why it did that.

Ah, springtime in the woods:

Okay, not a picture of a bug. Just a picture of loveliness.

Leaf footed bug
 

Winter fireflies. I think the larger one is the female.

There is a patch of dandelions on a slope along my path that was host to dozens of bees:

Honeybee

A couple of sweat bees. Everybody was kung fu fighting on these flowers, which was a bit odd, because usually they are happy to share; there's lot of flowers, and these bees are small. But there was quite a bit of scuffling going on.

 

We have a huge amount of garlic mustard, which is an invasive plant, and lately I have noticed that in spite of having a lot of these flowers, I never see bugs on them. I would expect the flowers to attract a lot of pollinators, but they don't. Today they had a couple, though:

We have a new policy–every time we go for a walk we each have to pull up at least 10 garlic mustard plants. Today I pulled up over a hundred. I am an over-achiever.

Today I saw three six-spotted tiger beetles, which is about 3 times more than I usually see in a day, if I see them at all. I know it was not the same one, because I saw them in far-flung places on the property. This is the only one I was able to photograph. If it had allowed me to get a little bit closer it would be Backyard Bug of the Day, but I am holding out for a close-up.

Okay, so I didn't completely give up on exercises in futility. These shots are a tiny bit better:

These are such cool bees that I always want to get a picture of one, but they don't land! They just zoom around, just above the leaf litter.

Alas.

We had a tiny bit of rain last night, which was not enough to really help the salamander eggs. The small pond was completely dried out yesterday, and today there were just a few tiny puddles. I can already see that some of the egg masses are getting a bit dried out, although the larvae are still moving around inside. But it's been warm and dry, and there's very little shade in the woods in April, so they are in full sun for most of the day. However, there was one egg mass that was in a puddle in what is usually the deepest part of the pond (also the shadiest, because there is a big, invasive shrub on that side):

That one I am pretty sure was trying hard to push out of its egg. It appears to have eaten all the algae inside, and it was really wiggling a lot.

This one wriggled up from somewhere, already having hatched! It then pushed its way under the egg mass. I don't know why, but maybe it was trying to get somewhere sheltered?

Here's a closer look at them; the one on the left was already hatched, the one on the right was working on it.

There's still plenty of water in the large pond, though. And it looks like the salamander eggs there may have already hatched:

It doesn't look like there's anything in the eggs anymore.

When I approached the big pond I heard a series of plops and saw a lot of ripples where frogs had leapt into the water. Not all of them were afraid, though:

And tadpoles, of course:

This one is starting to develop legs.

And there were a couple of frogs in the stream, but not as many as I expected on such a nice day, after a not-freezing night (which brings mind the fact that if we had had another freezing night last night, like the last several, we would had had snow instead of rain. That was the basic theme of our entire winter):

An aside, with no pictures to back it up: I think I saw more squirrels today than I have ever seen in my life. They were everywhere. And it kind of supports my hypothesis last fall–in 2022 none of the trees in my backyard and woods produced any nuts. None at all, no acorns, not butternuts, no walnuts, no hickory nuts–nothing (okay, not nothing–the hazelnut trees I planted produced nuts. Which I harvested. There weren't many). I thought that this would cause a crash in the animal populations that feed on nuts, and in fact last year, following that nutless fall, there were very few squirrels and chipmunks around. But last fall, 2023, every tree had a bumper crop of nuts, they were everywhere. And I thought that this would provide enough food for the remaining nut-eaters that they would produce a lot of young and a lot would survive, and here we are, lots and lots of squirrels (and chipmunks) this year.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Nature is fascinating.