This or That?

 Today I had time for one walk: bugs or woods. I chose woods. I brought my camera, and had to decide between macro lens and wide angle lens. I chose wide angle, because I wanted to get pictures of how green the woods are now...

... because the leaves have burst out in their glory this week, and today was a beautiful, sunshiny day. You can see that the trees are not fully leafed out, and some species have a long way to go, but suddenly the woods are all green and I love it. This is not a job for a macro lens. So I brought the wide angle, in part because I didn't expect to see many bugs, because I haven't seen many lately. You know how this story goes. Of course I saw lots and lots of bugs. I take pictures of bugs even when I am not trying to:

 I was just trying to take pictures of dogwood flowers. Instead I got a wasp, and if you look very hard, a gnat.

And I thought I was just taking a picture of a violet on a mossy rock in the middle of the stream:

... but I was also taking a picture of a stonefly, which I did not see until I saw it on my computer screen.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

The moth, not the ants.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

Leaf-footed bug. I think squash bug, which is a kind of leaf-footed bug, perhaps. I don't know, it's kind of confusing. The thing about common names is that not everyone agrees about what they are, and when things fall into more than one, based on species, genera (whatever that is)... It's a Hemiptera, that much I know.

When we bought our woods, we didn't end up really exploring most of it until the winter, even though we bought the property in the middle of summer. We didn't know where the boundaries were, and a lot of the part closest the house was pretty packed with vines and thorny shrubs. It took us a while to really get into the woods, and then we were surprised to see so little understory. As it turns out, much of the understory is ferns, which we didn't find out until they emerged last spring. And now they are emerging again:

Ferns are unfurling all over the forest floor.

I'm not feeling very optimistic about the fate of the salamander eggs. The rain this week has given them a reprieve, but unless we start to get more normal rain amounts this pond is not going to last long enough for them to hatch, much less live out their aquatic life stage:

Still nesting:

Mourning dove

Arachnid Appreciation:

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You can't see the other one, but there were a couple of spiders scurrying among the leaf litter here. It's quite usual, actually, that if I see one spider in the leaf litter there will be one or two others within about six inches.

I noticed the beetle before the spider. For the beetle's sake, I hope it notices the web. For the spider's sake, I hope it doesn't.

Will I, or Won't I?

 I'm currently debating with myself about whether I want to post a blog tonight. Or rather, I am debating whether or not I want to write a blog tonight. No, whether I want to spend the time loading pictures for a blog.

My instinct is no.

And yet...

 Bees on flowering crab apple. You can see that a lot of the flowers have lost their petals as the tree is past peak bloom.

Click beetle and snow flea

Lots of ant activity today:

There are a lot of little earthworms on the front walk, possibly because of the three days of rain we just had, and the ants are happy to drag them away.

On leafy spurge

On an apple that someone tossed by the curb in the cul-de-sac.

The vast majority of the bugs I saw today were around the cul-de-sac, where there is a huge patch of garlic mustard in bloom. There are a lot of flowers blooming in my backyard, the most dandelions I have ever had in the yard, violets, and (unfortunately) other patches of the invasive garlic mustard, but those flowers were almost completely devoid of insects. In the cul-de-sac, however, the garlic mustard attracted bees, flies, butterflies, and who knows what else. Most of them were not photographable, for various reasons, but I got a few:

Bee
 

Hover fly doing an excellent job of looking like a bee

The big one is a bee, I think the small one, which I did not see when I took the picture, might be a tiny wasp.

Arachnid Appreciation:

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May Day

 It's May, and the Canada mayflowers are blooming:

 I wasn't going to do a bug walk today, because I didn't feel like being productive, or at least didn't feel like making an effort and being disappointed, as so often happens. It was still kind of windy, and a cursory look around didn't show me much other than a few flies. But I did anyway, and now I have almost 400 pictures to sort through for this post... [later... and now that I have, you're only going to see pictures of maybe half of the bugs I took pictures of, because a lot of them are not any good].

 Backyard Bird of the Day:

Can you spot the eye of this mourning dove on its nest?

Backyard Bug of the Day:

Spring azure butterfly on garlic mustard flowers

It gave me a tiny glimpse of the azure color on the dorsal side of its wings.

Other Bugs:

Bumblebee on creeping myrtle. For some reason the carpenter bee was not patrolling the rock garden today, so other bees like this bumblebee were free to feed on the flowers without being chased away.

Click beetle. You can't really tell from this picture, but it blended in really well between these leaf buds on an oak tree.

This wasp is so tiny I thought it was a gnat.

 

Winter firefly

Beetle

Ant on sassafras flowers

Beetle

The crab apple tree is in full bloom. I am surprised at how few bees are being attracted to it–in the past I could stand under it and hear a symphony of buzzing when the tree is all aflower, but the last couple of days I could only spot a few bees.

There are two bees here.

Beetle:

Stinkbug

I am not really sure if this is a bee or a fly. I think bee. On dandelion

Arachnid Appreciation:

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Jumping spider:

 

As I was taking pictures of a mite that was hurrying along a tree trunk, I happened to spot something else lurking nearby. Can you see the spider?

Also a snow flea; I saw a few of those on the trunks today.

As usual, it's a snake for Backyard Reptile of the Day:

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Also as usual, I found it by almost stepping on it and then seeing it when it darted away. It didn't go far, though, and was extremely compliant about letting me take photos.

Garter snake. When I see a snake and it looks like this one I have to be sure to get a decent shot of the head so that I can look at it and see if it's a garter snake or a ribbon snake. The black lines on the labial scales and the lack of a white dot in front of the eye indicate a garter snake.

Keeled scales. Sometimes when you look up how to identify species of snakes it will say if they have keeled scales or non-keeled scales (smooth scales). If you look at these scales you will see that the have a ridge down the middle like the keel of a boat.

Injured tail. I swear, I didn't do it. Even if I was the kind of person who would attack an animal out of nastiness, knowing that the vast majority of snake bites occur when someone is trying to kill a snake would keep me from attacking it. Garter snakes, of course, are not venomous, but you can get a nasty infection from the bite of a non-venomous snake.