Getting Dizzy

There's really not much to say about the backyard today. Most of the bugs I saw - and there weren't many - didn't want their pictures taken, and acted accordingly. It's been a theme lately. So, let's get on with the ones who obliged me, at least a little.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Caterpillar. About half an inch long, maybe a bit less.

 When I found it, it was dangling by a thread like this.

 I know this is a dreadful picture, but bear with me, because I have a story to tell, and this picture illustrates it best. The caterpillar was dangling by its silk thread, and mostly it was in this particular posture, with its body bent so it was almost parallel to the ground. It was wiggling a bit, and would straighten out, but then curl up like this again. All of this makes for a difficult photography subject, but what made it worse is that even though it was mostly a calm day, as soon as I tried to take the caterpillar's picture, the wind started to blow. Well, at this point I hadn't found a bug for Backyard Bug of the Day yet, even though I had already walked over about half of the backyard, and I haven't seen a caterpillar like this so far this year (though, interestingly, it is the second caterpillar this week, so two different species), so it was obviously a good BBotD candidate, so I waited for the gust of wind to die down. But like I said, the caterpillar was wiggling on its own, so even without the wind, it was hard to get a picture. Then something really interesting happened (which I don't have a picture of. Sorry). You know how when figure skaters are doing spins, they pull in really tight to speed up the spin? Well, the caterpillar, who was spinning a little bit as a result of its wiggling, suddenly went perfectly straight and started spinning really fast. I don't know if that was intentional, or just happened as a result of the way it moved, but it had some pretty impressive figure-skater-like speed for a few seconds. If it was not trying to do that, I have to wonder if that made it dizzy. Can caterpillars get dizzy? The world may never know.

 So, you are now wondering, how did the caterpillar get onto the leaf? Did it crawl up the thread, like caterpillars sometimes do? No. I lifted it there myself (grabbing the thread, not the caterpillar). I don't like to do that kind of thing, because of my non-interference policy, but I was frustrated, I needed a decent picture, and I figured if the caterpillar didn't want to be on the leaf it would just fling itself off again, like I see bugs do all the time. However, it didn't seem to mind. It moved onto the leaf edge...

 ... and looked around a bit. Well, maybe look isn't the right word, because caterpillars, in spite of having a lot of eyes, don't have very good eyesight. But it did seem to be investigating its location (and the leaf I moved it onto was on the same vine it had been dangling from anyway, so at least if that was a host plant I didn't remove it). Note how few prolegs it has - just the two pairs in the back. It has the prolegs of an inchworm, but it's a bit stockier than inchworms usually are. Or loopers, as I think they are really called. I didn't see it walk, but with that arrangement of legs that is probably how it moves.

 This was interesting, too - see the silk thread? It seems to have attached it to the leaf and spun it out. Caterpillars' silk glands are near their mouths. Also you can see several of its eyes in this shot.

 Zoomed-in shot of the face, showing the eyes.

Pollinating the dandelions is still the most popular activity for the Backyard's Random Bugs:

 Fly

 Wasp. See, they don't just fly around stinging people for the fun of it (just kidding. They don't do that). They also pollinate flowers.

Tiny bee. That is not its actual name. I am just saying that it was tiny.

 Click beetle getting ready to fly!

 It didn't fly far. Just to another blade of grass about an inch away.

Flying again! It went to another nearby blade of grass.

Arachnid Appreciation:

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Crabby Apples

There is a scene in the movie Bringing Up Baby in which a paleontologist named David (played by Carey Grant) is trying to explain to a socialite who has just turned his life upside down named Susan (played by Katherine Hepburn) that he likes her but needs her to go away and leave him alone. He says to her, "In moments of quiet I am strangely drawn toward you; but, well, there haven't been any quiet moments." That pretty much sums up my feelings toward the outdoors today. When the wind wasn't blowing it was absolutely gorgeous. But the wind was always blowing. Wind makes me cross. It makes insect macrophotography - or any of my outdoor photography, really - very difficult. Add in a bunch of extremely uncooperative bugs, and a lot of airborne pollen, and, well, like I said, I felt like a paleontologist whose world was just turned upside down. That is perhaps a bad analogy. Anyway, that was a long way of saying that the backyard made me grumpy today. I still love it, but it made me grumpy.

I went outside earlier than I planned today because I was looking out the window and noticed that the flowering crab apple tree was suddenly really attractive to birds. I saw several different species of birds in the tree, pecking at something. I assume they were eating last season's crab apples, because they are still on the tree. I mean, I don't think the eat flowers. Although those crab apples have been on the tree since last summer, so why they are suddenly eating them now, when they are all shrivelled up, I have no idea. Anyway, one of the birds was worth me going downstairs and putting the telephoto lens on the camera and going outside before breakfast.

Backyard Bird of the Day:

 Just kidding. Did I mention it was windy today? The bird is in there, just really blurry...

 This is a little better. When I was looking out the window I thought this was a goldfinch, but looking at the pictures I think it might be a warbler. What kind of warbler? I have no idea. There are about 75 billion* different warblers in my bird book, and 99%* of them look pretty much like this. And I am worse at bird identification than bug identification. Plus, I never got a really clear shot of the bird. Also, my bird book actually has 2 full pages of "confusing fall warblers." So... don't know what this bird is, but it is pretty, and it likes crab apples.

*slight exaggeration

 If you are trying to figure out what this bird is from these pictures, that is not a dark stripe on its head, it is a shadow from the tree.

So, while I was outside with my camera with the telephoto lens, I saw a cool bee/wasp. The telephoto lens is not good for taking pictures of bugs, especially bugs that keep flying from flower to flower. However, I made do.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 

 The picture doesn't really show it, but when it was flying it looked red. Like a red blur, really.

Most of the insects I saw to today were bees or wasps:

 This one wouldn't let me get any closer.

 

 Did I mention how uncooperative the bugs were today?

 Found another one of these. Or it could be the same one from yesterday, it was on the same tree.

 I saw a LOT of winter fireflies.

 And the first assassin bug of the season. An immature one. I say that based on the undeveloped wings, not on any juvenile behavior on its part. Although it was very uncooperative.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 Bowl and doily spider, I think.

Two Cold

I was hoping it would rain all day so that I would have an excuse to not go outside to do a bug walk. It was cold today. Ironically, today's high temperature in the upper 40s would have seemed warm two months ago, but two days last week were in the 80s, so now temperatures in the 40s are cold (For a frame of reference, normal for this time of year is low to mid 60s). It did rain, a little, including when I went outside grudgingly to look for bugs, because the weather is just plain obnoxious, but it wasn't enough to give me an excuse to just skip the whole thing. I fully expected to find no bugs.

I wasn't far off.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I have seen these around for the last couple of days, and I think I have seen male and female specimens - I think the insect caught in the screen door the other day was a male, and this is a female. What am I basing this on? Nothing, really, it's just a guess, based on things they have in common, and things that are different. This one, and the others I think are female, have bigger bodies, which seems to be a common type of sexual dimorphism in insects. And the males have bigger eyes, which I have also seen in other insect species. I couldn't find these in my books, however, so it really is just a huge guess, and nothing you should be taking as fact.

 Here is the other bug I saw today. I think it was huddled against the cold.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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I found this spider under a piece of wood. Also huddling against the cold - and pretending to be invisible.

Goochie Goo

Baby animals seem to be emblematic of springtime - lambs, chicks... baby bugs?

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I think this is a hopper nymph, so, a baby hopper.

 Aw, cute, little baby!

And...

 ... another baby hopper. I know it is hard to get a sense of scale in my pictures, but if you've ever looked at a dandelion, and know roughly the size of the petals, you'll get a sense of how small this is.

Here's the same picture, zoomed in.

And on a nearby blade of grass...

 ... another baby hopper.

Zoomed in. In both of these cases the bugs hopped away before I could get a closer picture. But the Backyard Bug of the Day was as close as I could get with the camera.

Meanwhile, on the sappy stump...

 I spotted this tiny fly.

 It was marching around, signaling with its wings.

Then on the other side of the backyard...

 I found another one, doing the same thing on a dead branch. I am 99% sure I saw this exact same kind of bug, doing this same wing-waving thing, on this same dead branch last year. My guess is that the wing-waving thing has to do with either attracting a mate or claiming territory, but I don't really know.

One of the flowering crab apple trees is in full bloom, and attracting a lot of bugs. This year most of the flowers are up too high for me to get a close-up of them, but it was interesting to see the swarm of insects flying around the top of the tree. Wanting to give a sense of how this looks, I decided to take some pictures. Naturally the second I pointed the camera up, most of the insects disappeared. But here are a few shots anyway. Try to find the bees (or flies, mostly you can't tell from that difference, especially in a still shot where you can't see how they fly):

 The bumblebees are pretty easy to spot.

 Remember we were recently discussing (and I use the term discussing in a totally incorrect sense) that ants can carry much more than their own weight?

 I don't think you're going to be able to pick this one up, ant.

Spotted this insect on a leaf bud, and got a few pictures, but I got too close and it dropped to the grass.

 Then it sat there like this for a while.

Fly away!

A few porch light visitors - three different moth species. Those are the handles of our snow shovels - it's probably safe to put those away now...

Arachnid Appreciation:
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In my years of taking macrophotographs of bugs I have learned a few things, and one of the things I have learned is when it is pointless to try to take a picture, because the bug is not going to cooperate. This mite was running at quite a clip along this tree trunk, so I knew that a close-up shot would never work, so here's a long shot, showing at least the bright red color.