Fairies

Have you ever seen the movie Fairy Tale: A True Story? It's about two little girls in England in 1917 who fake some photographs of fairies, and the world goes crazy over it (as much as it could in an era before the internet). Sir Arthur Conan Doyle himself was taken in.  They didn't fess up to the fraud until they were very, very old, sort of a deathbed confession.

Recently a man in England, a professor of some kind, I think, published some photographs he said maybe showed fairies. I assume he was joking. I looked at the pictures and saw bugs. I have taken pictures exactly like his before. There are bugs I see in my yard sometimes that look like fairies when they are flying, and I have a theory that suchlike bugs are the reason people believed in fairies in the first place.

Anyway, I was tempted to make the following the Backyard Bug of the Day, but then, maybe these are not bugs. Maybe they are fairies.

 These bugs were really, really tiny, and they never landed (thus the blurry flying photos), so I have no idea what they even looked like. I don't know it they were moths, or gnats, or what.

Even zooming in on this one doesn't fully show what the bug is like. Except it doesn't look like moth wings. You can see from the pictures, though, how they might look like tiny people with wings.

I did my bug walk around 7 a.m. again, and had a hard time finding bugs. I was kind of surprised. The sun was well up, it wasn't cold... but I aside from the above fairies, and some sawfly larvae that I already knew were there, I had a hard time finding anything (except mosquitoes).

So, here's my early morning Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I think this is some sort of cranefly?

Cool wings.

Another favorite for Backyard Bud of the Day:

Today was kind of a day for tiny bugs. First the fairies, and then I found this one:

 To give you a sense of how small this is, this bug is on a head of grass, sitting on a grass seed. Really small. Like, too small to really see what it's like with the naked eye.

This was as close as I could get with the camera, and I can't really be sure, but it sort of looks like the bug might be covered in a drop of water? It didn't rain last night, but it was pretty dewy this morning.

One more bud for you:

This would be a late bloomer.

Let's see...

I couldn't decided on a Daily Dandelion, so you're getting two:

Sort of a before and after theme here.

I did see a fair few spiders this morning, so here's some Arachnid Appreciation:
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I am not sure if it's a crab spider or not...

Still no fireflies...