New Neighbors

It rained all day today, which is kind of unusual. In the almost 4 years I have been writing this blog it has been very rare for there to be a day when the rain didn't stop for at least a few minutes when I could go outside and look for bugs. But today it was at least drizzling all day, and even pouring at times, with some thunder in the evening. It was a really spring-showers kind of day. Very April.

And speaking of spring (which I know I do pretty much incessantly lately), there was a sign of spring on my porch this morning. When I went out to get the mail, as soon as I opened the door I saw that there was a mess on my porch. For about a second I wondered what the heck was going on, but it only took a second to realize why there were dry leaves, bits of lichen, and dried grasses strewn all over the porch. And the reason is that robins are messy when they are building their nests:

 I think that robins build a few nests and then decide which one to use, so this doesn't mean that they will be raising chicks on my porch again. If they do, we'll have to start using the back door for a while. I hadn't seen any sign of nest-building activity before today, so I think they built this whole thing this morning, which is pretty impressive. And they aren't the only contractors who didn't bother to clean up the mess after they were done.

Fortunately, I didn't have to go outside to find bugs, because one came inside to visit. This was wandering around near the couch last night (after midnight, that's why it's on today's blog). I got a couple of pictures, and then it scurried away into hiding before I could get the bug catcher to put it outside, so it's probably still wandering around in here somewhere.

Ground beetle.

Art

The arts center in the city where I live has an annual art show which I have entered for the past few years. The first year I entered I submitted a couple of bug pictures, and a picture of a dandelion. My dandelion was accepted. The bugs were not (and they were pretty mainstream bugs–a close-up of a butterfly, and a bee). Most of the pictures I have submitted since have been nature pictures, and I think all of my pictures that have been accepted have been nature pictures from my backyard. I haven't submitted anymore bugs, but I have entered close-ups of feathers and leaves, and last year won third prize for another dandelion picture. This year the show's theme is Nature, which I was pretty excited about when I found out about it. And I have been enjoying looking at pictures to decide which ones to submit, because nature is beautiful. I was very tempted to use all three of my entries this year on pictures of bugs, to make a statement about what is beautiful in nature, but I am chickening out on that plan. I am going to submit pictures of flowers and moss... and one picture of a spider. Because I still have a statement to make, and I may be too cowardly to make it with all bugs, but I will try to give a spider its day in the art gallery.

I don't have a Backyard Bug of the Day today. There were surprisingly few bugs to be found in the backyard today. I did see a chipmunk for the first time since last fall. It is strange that I have not seen them so far this year, but I have a feeling they did not fare well this winter. The last couple of years there was a population explosion of chipmunks, because of mild winters and bumper crops of acorns, but while we did have a pretty mild winter overall, there was a very poor acorn crop in the fall (possibly because of the gypsy moth caterpillars, the little fiends!), and I fear that many of those chipmunks may not have had enough food to survive until spring.

But here's what I have for you:

 Ants

 The baby tent caterpillars have built their first tent.

 Candy-striped leaf hopper

 Brown marmorated stinkbug

World of Seasons

According to the analytics of the site that hosts this blog, people from all over the world read about my backyard. They aren't regular readers, I can tell that, but the daily demographics will show readers from about ten different countries every day. It's not the same countries every day, that is how I know that I don't have regular readers from those places. But I was thinking about this today as I walked around my backyard seeing evidence of the advance of the season because at the antipodes of my backyard (well, not quite the antipodes: if you drilled straight through the earth from my backyard you would come up under the ocean, but at the closest point of land to my antipodes), winter is coming. While things are coming alive in the little-over-an-acre area that I write about, it's the middle of autumn in some of the places where people might be reading this. And for some people, there might not be much difference between summer and winter, having mild weather year 'round. But for me, right now I am glorying in the unfurling of tiny, green leaves, and the signs that the world is indeed awake. My part of the world, that is.

Today was exactly the kind of day that I want spring to be: it was warm, it was sunny, and there were bugs everywhere. Once again I was unable to photograph most of them, but it is still a pleasure to see them. Standing in the rock garden I was surrounded by bees; if I closed my eyes I would still have known they were there from the buzzing. And if I looked a little deeper, below the level of the plants, there were ants scurrying underneath. The rock garden right now is like a city; not one of those that never sleeps, but like one of those with a downtown area full of office buildings where there are people hard at work all day, rushing to get things done, and then later, in the evening, they all go home somewhere else to rest. It's competitive, too: the bumblebees especially are very aggressive with the other insects, chasing away other bees, and butterflies.

And speaking of butterflies, today was a 4-species day in my backyard, including one of today's Backyard Co-Bugs of the Day.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

 Bee fly. I have only seen a couple of these, ever. They are charming, but they don't sit still for long! As you may guess from the name, it is a fly, but it looks like a bee.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

 I think this is either a comma or a question mark butterfly. I have never really been able to tell them apart, and, well, you'll see from the pictures why I have never gotten a good id... It does a very good job of looking like a dried up leaf when its wings are closed.

 As for its wings being open...

 

 It only gives quick glimpses of the dorsal side of its wings.

Backyard Bird of the Day:

 A flock of cedar wax wings came to dine on the berries of a cedar tree.

 

I mentioned seeing four species of butterflies today. There was the comma or question mark above, some spring azures, some cabbage whites, and...

 

 One mourning cloak! It seems every year I see one mourning cloak butterfly in the rock garden, and then it flies away down the driveway. I think in the past it has been more like March when I see them, but I am always happy to see them whenever it is.

In the rock garden were so many bees!

 

 

 An ant carrying an impressively long bit of moss

I have been wondering about the recently hatched caterpillars, because there didn't seem to be anything for them to eat. The tree that they are on has not yet leafed out. But I'm not sure the caterpillars cared, since they mostly seemed to just hang around on their egg mass. But today, they were on the move:

 Their tree is about to get some leaves, and they are all ready to eat them.

Rove beetle with its wings out...

 

 ... and with its wings pulled in... mostly.

 Click beetle.

I found a new-for-me species of spider today for Arachnid Appreciation:
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I haven't seen any snakes for a while, in spite of the nice weather, so I thought that maybe they had moved on from the den where they have been. There wasn't one there when I checked today on my way to get the mail, but later, during my bug walk... Snake of the Day:
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It is about half-way in its hole here. That is how it was when I spotted it, it wasn't one of those cases where I got too close and it fled down the hole. It did continue the rest of the way in, though, as I was watching. Funny thing, though, is that about two minutes before I got this shot, I had walked past that area and looked for the snake and I didn't see one. So either it wasn't there before, or it was hiding well among the leaf litter and I didn't see it.

At the end of my bug walk I went back to see if it had come out again, and it had, but was in the same position of being half-way down the hole. When I arrived it quickly zipped all the way down, but being an optimist, I waited to see if it would come back up. And it did... a little bit. Can you spot it?

It just poked its head out. It stayed like that for about a minute, but when I leaned in to get a closer picture it disappeared, and in spite of my optimistic waiting, did not come back out while I was there.

Lazy Sunday

I must confess to being a terribly negligent backyard bug blogger today. It was a gorgeous, sunny, warm day, and I went off elsewhere to do other things instead of looking for bugs in my backyard. I finally did do a bug walk when I got home in the evening (and I love daylight savings time because I can do a bug walk after 6 in the evening now), but it was definitely past prime bug time. When we went out for the day, the rock garden was teeming with many bees, of different species. When I did my bug walk there were just a few bumblebees. Not that I don't like bumblebees, but I also like variety.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Yeah, it's a gnat. I thought it was pretty cool, though, because it was doing a circus high-wire act on a spider thread. It wasn't stuck; not all spider threads are sticky, including the ones that spiders use to travel from place to place.

 Moth on the window

 One of the aforementioned bumblebees. I have noticed that late in the day they like to just hang out on the side of the house for a while.

 Today all of the tiny caterpillars switched sides again on their egg mass. They were back on the path side.

 

 I think this is another species of sawfly. I have seen 4 or 5 in the past week, I think.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Grammar Lessons

If you were a kid in American in the 1970s, like I was, and you watched cartoons on Saturday mornings, like I did, you know the pleasure of seeing the antics of mystery-solving dogs periodically suspended for a few minutes for lessons on history and grammar. I am talking, of course, about Schoolhouse Rock, a series of public service cartoon shorts that made us enjoy learning on our day off from school because they had catchy tunes. Schoolhouse Rock is the reason that most Americans my age can recite (or sing, anyway) the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States of America. We the people grew up on that stuff, and boy, those songs have stuck with me. Today, as I was doing my bug walk, the song that was jauntily bopping around in my head was the one about adjectives, a classic grammar lesson. Here's a bit from the first verse: "I unpacked frustrating first... reached in and found the word worst..."

Yes, my bug walk today was VERY frustrating. Why? Because I saw a LOT of bugs. And I didn't get pictures of most of them! You're going to think I am complaining about nothing when you see the pictures I did get, but you have no idea what I went through. For example, today I saw MANY species of bees (okay, you're going to see some of those), several species of sawflies (you'll see one), wasps, velvet ants (which are actually wasps), two species of butterflies–my first of the year! (you'll only see one)... you get the idea. A big part of the problem is that at this time of year, the bugs are mostly at or near ground level. There's no leaves on the trees yet, there's nothing green or blooming that is tall, so the bugs are all hanging out on the flowers that are available, which are all low to the ground. And I am not even going to go into the rant on how back-breaking it is to get those shots, or the explanation of why I didn't get them.

Here's a sample of how things went:

 There's my first butterfly of the year in my backyard! Wait, you can't see it? Sorry, this is as close as I got before it flew away.

 Here, let me help you out.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 A beautiful bee on leafy spurge

 I don't know what this is. I thought it was a spider at first, but it is so tiny that I really couldn't tell (and I didn't get close enough to really see).

Magnified, though, I can see that it has antennae, which means it is not a spider. Maybe an unbelievably small beetle? I shall never know...

Speaking of beetles...

 Weevil

There were A LOT of bees in the rock garden. All over. Multiple species. They were chasing each other around, feeding on flowers... It was wonderful. I can't show you how wonderful it was, but it was. If you want to know what it was like, go dig up a patch of your lawn and replace it with a flowering ground cover of some kind, and then sit and watch.

 Bumblebee

 Sawfly, on the exact bush I don't want it to be on.

 I happened to look at the other side of the caterpillar egg mass today (the side the is not facing the path), and it was covered in caterpillars! I suspect they might still be hatching.

 Moth

A couple of nearly identical sweat bees on daffodils.

 I know they look the same, but this one was a lot smaller.

 So uncooperative...

Check out what this bee is doing–it is cleaning its back with its middle legs, so it looks like it is doing yoga.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 I think this jumping spider has caught some prey, but it's hard to see...

 

 ... Nope, can't see from this angle, either.

Can you spot the spider hiding on the tree trunk?

 How about now?