The Circle of Lepidoptera Life

Do you remember how in old cartoons they would show that someone was broke by having them open their change purse, or the old sock in which they carried their money, and moths would fly out? To show that there was no money in there, and had not been for a long time? That was my mailbox this morning when I went out to get the mail. Apparently a bunch of gypsy moth caterpillars crawled in there–how, I don't know–to pupate, and now they are moths. And apparently it is harder for a moth to get out of a closed mailbox than it is for a caterpillar to get in there. So, that was all kind of icky. It was not quite like the cartoons, though, because there was mail in the mailbox.

Today my bug walk started out to be another big fail, but suddenly it became a butterfly walk, which is a most beautiful thing. It was really quite charming at one point, with two species of butterflies fluttering in circles around me.

I'll start with today's Backyard Bug of the Day:

At first I thought this was a new species for me, but when I really looked closely at the picture, and did a little checking, I realized it is a mourning cloak butterfly. I don't think I have ever seen one in the middle of summer, I usually see them very early in the spring–they overwinter as butterflies, hiding in woodpiles and such. Usually when I see them they are kind of battered, with broken wings. This is quite a nice specimen, I am guessing it's pretty new. Oh, and I want you to know that in order to get this picture I had to climb into a thorn bush.

The first butterfly I saw today, though, was the always uncooperative...

Small wood satyr

And then, monarch butterflies!

Female

I saw her lay this egg.

There were at least two monarchs, because I saw them chasing each other around up in the air. There could have been more; it's impossible to know if the same butterfly keeps coming back or if there are many of them.

I also saw one or more swallowtails. Not well enough to identify the species, but at least this one almost paused for a couple of pictures.

I also spotted this, and wondered how I had missed it before:

A bit of dried leaf on the garden fence?

No, a chrysalis! Another one that is either a viceroy or red-spotted purple. If I wasn't going to be going away soon I would "adopt" the two chrysalides just to find out what emerges from them. I wonder how long this one has been on the fence. Note the curve in this one, too.

I found a couple of caterpillars, too–monarch caterpillars!

You can't tell from the pictures, but this one is about twice the size of the one below.

This one was very active:

It didn't seem so at first, because it was just sitting on this leaf, but when I went by a few minutes later and tried to find it again, it wasn't there...

It had crawled across a leaf onto the next plant over,  and was wandering around on the flower buds.

So today I found the entire Lepidoptera life cycle–an egg, caterpillars, chrysalides, and butterflies. It's too bad I didn't find a monarch chrysalis, then I would have the whole set of one species! Anyway, it's cool to have found all four stages in one day, even for different species.

Backyard Fungus of the Day:

 I don't think I have seen this species of mushroom in my backyard before. I don't have a mushroom field guide, so I have no idea what it is.

 Other Bugs:

 Another little Lepidoptera

 Beetle

 Candy striped leaf hopper

A couple of species of lady beetles:

 My favorite: Brachiacantha ursina

 My unfavorite: Twenty-spotted lady beetles. Male and female, from left to right in this picture.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 Not sure what's going on here... foot in mouth? Scratching its belly?

The Porch is the Place to Be

For some reason, today's bug walk was a complete waste of time. Well, nearly complete. There were a few bugs. But I had to depend on the porch light for a Backyard Bug of the Day today.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Katydid. I think this is the first adult I have seen this summer.

I might as well continue with the other porch bugs:

 There is a tomato plant on the porch, and this little critter was on the tomato plant.

There was a bit of a Porch Light Lepidoptera Lollapalooza going on tonight. There were many species, mostly really tiny, several male gypsy moths (ugh), and it was generally very mothy:

 I think this is a moth fly, which is actually not a moth, but a fly. And really tiny.

Moths:

 This fly has gorgeous wings! It wouldn't sit still for pictures, or for me to get a good look at it, but it looks like it might have a parasite attached to its body.

As for the bugs from my bug walk:

 The viceroy-or-red-spotted-purple chrysalis has a bend in it again. Chrysalides do react to stimuli, so maybe something alarmed it.

A couple of very different larvae:

 Fall webworm caterpillar, and whatever that weird, fuzzy thing is (which I think is a sawfly larva of some kind).

 Honey bee on milkweed

 Weevil

 Beetle. It flared its antennae at me.

 I have been trying for a while to get a good picture of this, but they never seem to come out. I don't even remember if I have posted it, because the pictures have been so bad. I think this is a brown hooded owlet moth caterpillar. It is the smallest I have ever seen, and it only has the black and yellow stripes, not the red and orange, so my guess is that it develops those colors in later instars, or it is a totally different species.

This plant for weeks was home to several buffalo tree hoppers. Today all I could find was this. These always seem like insect ghosts to me, but in reality they are insect skeletons–exoskeletons.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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My guess is that this is a male arrow-shaped micrathena spider.

Wake-up Call

Last night I stood out on the back porch looking at the stars and watching the fireflies, and while there were beauties to be seen, there was nothing interesting to listen to. Other than the sounds of traffic from the highway in the distance, there was no sound at all. No crickets, no katydids, no tree frogs... no sounds of nature. It is ironic, then, that today I was awakened by the sound of an insect. At first I was confused, in the bleariness of waking, not knowing if I was hearing a neighbor using a power tool, or a cicada. When I went out to do my bug walk, though, it became clear that it was, indeed, a cicada that was my alarm clock in the morning. I didn't see one; I have only seen a handful of them in the 19 years since we bought the land here, and by a handful I mean about the number of fingers I have on one hand. But I could hear them, though. One of the unmistakable sounds of summer.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Damselfly, in the process of eating a crane fly

 

Delicate, but deadly. A most graceful predator.

Other Bugs:

 Some kind of chrysalis. I wonder where that hair-like thread came from.

 Robber fly, laying eggs, I think.

 Some kind of Hemiptera nymph. Possibly a stinkbug

I found a lot of assassin bug nymphs today, of a variety of species:

 This one has caught a tiny beetle.

Caterpillars pretending to be twigs:

 

 You know a fly is tiny when it's smaller than an aphid.

Hopper nymph. I really wish I knew what these grow up to be.

 Weevil

 This looks like an ant, but much bigger, and with wings. I know that ants have wings when it's time to swarm, but there were no swarms of ants around.

 Four-lined plant bug

Bees on milkweed:

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Spined micrathena

Possibly a cross spider?