Don't Blink

Sheesh! I miss one day of walking around the backyard, and so many things change! Okay, so just a couple of things change - the leaves are open more, there's a couple of plants that suddenly have them that didn't before, the other crabapple tree is blooming...

Here are both crabapples - you can see the one on the right is just starting to bloom. There are not as many bees around the other one now - they're not so audible anymore, and it is starting to drop petals. And there's my stone bench, where I spent a little time sitting today. I brought out a book and my iPod, but mostly I just sat and looked around. If I had brought out a camera I could have taken some good shots of birds, including what I think was a little warbler I have not seen before, but I didn't bring out a camera at that time, so I just sat there being annoyed about the good shots I was missing. Which probably means I need to spend more time just sitting outside.
Here's a look at one of the new crabapple flowers - the second tree has darker flowers than the first one:

Anyway, let's continue on with the plants before we get to the bugs.

Backyard Bud of the Day - Wisteria:

And now just some random plants:

 The old and the new.

I have never seen so many flowers (I guess that's what these are) on the black birch before. I suspect these are the culprits behind the horrendous pollen on Saturday that chased me back into the house. Today all the flowers were falling - at one point in the lat afternoon it was almost a rain of black birch flowers. The ground was covered with them. It was bizarre, and in all the time we have been here, I have never seen it like that. I guess the winter was very favorable to black birch, even if the rest of us didn't like it.

Now, for Backyard Bug of the Day! We're going to have a story today, about Backyard Bug Behavior.

This is the story of a caterpillar.

Okay, no, I am not going to narrate it that way, I don't have enough time right now...
Here's the thing about being a caterpillar. You're soft, squishy, have no exoskeleton to protect your squishy self, have no stinger or venom (okay, that's not true, some of the fuzzy ones do, so leave them alone, but this guy doesn't), or fangs, so you're not much good in a fight. That leaves flight as a defense mechanism, but you don't have wings yet. So what you do when you feel threatened is drop off the leaf where you were eating and hang from a silk thread until the threat is gone. That's where I found this little critter.

And why was the caterpillar dangling from a thread?

 To avoid a threat!

It would appear that this ant interrupted the caterpillar's breakfast, and the caterpillar thought discretion was the better part of valor, and jumped. You may recall a picture I posted the other day of an ant with something green in its mandibles, that at first I thought was a piece of leaf, but then realized was not - I think it was a caterpillar like this one.

Here you can see a leaf with some holes in it, possibly put there by the caterpillar.

The ant tried to get at the caterpillar, but apparently has no ability to pull up threads. Another interesting, if gross, bit of backyard bug behavior in this photo. A few photos previous perhaps you noticed that the fairly translucent caterpillar had a dark area near its back end? At the end of its digestive tract? Well, this photo beautifully captured the moment when that dark area passed out of the digestive tract of the caterpillar. Caterpillar droppings, in case you are interested (and who wouldn't be?), are called frass. Seeing frass on leaves is actually a pretty good way of finding caterpillars.

But I digress, into a disgusting area...

Eventually, the ant went away, and the caterpillar climbed back up the thread...

(You can see the leaf is partially eaten)

The End! I am not going to call this happily ever after - it's a rough life to be a bug...

Okay, how about some more Backyard Bug Behavior? Breeding Bees? (Yes, I love alliteration).

It took me a while to figure out what exactly was going on on this dandelion. I leave it to you to figure out who's who.

More interesting Backyard Bug Behavior from the standpoint of someone who takes pictures of bugs: Some bugs won't sit still long enough to have their picture taken at all. But some bugs will sit so still that you can go back a few days later and find them in the same place. True, this could be a different individual than the one that was featured the other day, and I don't think it was on the exact same leaf (but definitely the same plant), but it was nice to see Ol' Blue again today.

And back on the subject of tiny, green caterpillars dangling from threads...

I found this one dangling in front of my face... from my hair. I deposited it on the nearest tree. I wish I knew what kind it was, and what it liked to eat, because there was probably a better place to put it. And now that I look at it, there's a slight possibility it was a luna moth caterpillar, which means this was totally the wrong tree to leave it on. So now I feel bad, and hope it doesn't starve...


Last but not least, a combination of Backyard Bud Behavior and Arachnid Appreciation. It's not such a scary spider picture, and you can't even see the spider very well, but I'll send it down the page a bit just in case...
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I posted a picture of another bug doing this the other day. Apparently it's a Thing to Do. Too bad for them that unfurling leaves is a temporary sanctuary.

Is that everything for the day? I think so... No use regretting the lost opportunities for more alliteration with Backyard Bird of the Day...  Or what I might have seen if I had been home yesterday. The world moves on.