What Are You Looking At?

If you are trying to find bugs it is useful to know that sometimes bugs look like other things, like tree bark, or dead leaves, or bird poop. The drawback to knowing that is that sometimes you find yourself peering intently at, or taking close-up pictures of, tree bark, dead leaves, or... yeah, you get what I mean.

But don't worry, I am not going to post those pictures.

Today was another day without many bugs. I mowed the lawn today, and I don't think I stopped even once to go get my camera and take a picture of something. It is that bad. My latest hypothesis, and this one might have some scientific merit, is that it has to do with the fact that we have had so little rain.

So today I went back and found one of the two caterpillars from yesterday (I knew it would still be there), and it is Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

 This is a brown hooded owlet moth caterpillar. This is about as spectacular as you can get for caterpillars in Connecticut. It's amazing. And it turns into the most boring brown moth.

 These feed on goldenrod, which we have tons of in the backyard, so I see at least one of these every summer. This caterpillar (not this specimen, but this species), is part of the origins of my fascination with taking pictures of bugs. I saw my first one years before I had a macro lens, and it was around that time I started really wishing I had one.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

I don't know what it is, and of course it's not in my book. It's pretty big for this kind of thing. In case you're wondering, it's on a watermelon rind.

I had a bit of a surprise today:

 I was just standing in the backyard, under a tree, talking to my husband, and this caterpillar suddenly dropped down beside me on a silk thread.

 It hovered a few moments next to me, and started climbing back up.

Wonderfully random.

Some of the bugs were still hiding, though:

And some of the bees are really lethargic:

 Sometimes bumble bees seem to go into a stupor, particularly when it is cold out.

This makes it easy to take pictures of them.

Random bug:

Backyard Bud of the Day:

Yay! I found one!

The spiders for today are pretty high on the creepy scale, so don't go further if you are afraid of them, because it's time for Arachnid Appreciation:
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Remember that spider web I showed close up yesterday? Well, it was a pretty big orb weaver web, and I wanted to know what made it, so I went outside last night in the middle of the night to see if I could see it (I am a night owl anyway, so I was up). It was another orb weaver like the other two, but in a different spot. All three spiders were out last night, and two of them had prey they were dining on.

 This spider was eating something absolutely enormous (well, for this scale of life).

 I tried to figure out what it was, but I couldn't see enough of its anatomy.

 The new spider had much smaller prey.

 It also had a smaller neighbor.

 I saw this one earlier this evening. It looks like it's doing spider yoga.