Who's Counting?

Today, while I was sitting in a chair watching a caterpillar do nothing much (more on that later), I got to thinking about Bioblitz. Bioblitz is an event in which a group of scientists will spend 24 hours looking for every form of life they can in a designated area - I think parks, usually. I don't think they do them in Connecticut anymore, but they did them for about ten years in the mid-90's into the beginning of this century. We went to one once, just to see what was going on, and I brought a picture of a fungus in my yard to ask a scientist to identify it for me (cedar apple rust). I don't remember where that was, but they did hold one in the biggest park in the city where I live, and I was unable to go check it out that weekend.
When Bioblitz happened in my city they were in a park of 400 acres, which is mostly woods, with some mowed areas, two ponds, some streams, and a famous rose garden. In the 24 hours they found almost 1,900 species of... well, living things - they looks for animals, plants, fungi, everything. They found, for instance, 17 species of mammals. Anyone want to hazard a guess as to what they found the most of? Anyone? Something that maybe is of interest to a person who writes a blog about the bugs in her backyard?
What's that? Insects? Yes! You're right! Of the 1,898 species found in the park here in my city in that 24 hours, 889 of them were insects. I am not even including spiders in there - (They found 46 species of spiders/centipede/millipedes. I don't know why those three were lumped together in the count). For a little perspective, they found 433 species of plants. I don't know if that includes the 120 varieties of roses in the rose garden. That is a lot of insects. It kind of makes me feel like an underachiever here in my backyard, but to be fair, they had 400 acres to work with, and I only have 1.15578. Also, I have no aquatic habitat, and they had two ponds and several streams. Now, I am not limited to 24 hours, but also, I am only one person. There were 116 scientists participating the year they were in our park (granted, a lot of them were looking for things that were not insects). So my hundreds of species are starting to look pretty good, I think. No, I have never counted them, and I am not going to. But given that for the first two years of doing my Backyard Bug of the Day project I was finding something new almost every day from April/May until November, there are hundreds (This year, since I was sort of starting fresh with the blog, a lot of the BBotD's have been featured in past years). I am still finding new things on a fairly frequent basis.
So, why was I thinking about Bioblitz this afternoon? Because I was sitting in a chair watching a caterpillar that I thought was about to moult (it didn't), and from where I was, staring at a tree trunk, without moving my head much, even, I saw at least 10 different living things. Actually, plants are living things, so it would be more than that - there was the tree, the vine growing up it, the poison ivy at the base of it, the other tree crowding into it, the grass growing around it... There's a lot of life out there. I don't need to count it to be impressed by the wondrous variety of it.
That being said, not counting myself I saw four species of mammals in the backyard today (deer, chipmunk with its cheeks stuffed with nuts, squirrels, groundhog). I didn't see any amphibians or reptiles, and I am sure I saw birds, but I didn't really notice what kind. I certainly heard catbirds. I can't even come close to estimating the number of plants. I saw at least some lichens... you know what, there's a lot of stuff out there.

What I didn't see a lot of, given what I know is there, is bugs. Yes, I saw bugs, and what a normal person would consider a lot of bugs, but not a lot by my standards. Not anything that was very interesting to me. Not much that was cooperative, that's for sure. But enough to feel like the world is a pretty amazing place.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Bee, or hornet, or something. The notable thing about this bee (for me, because I am all about the aesthetics) is that depending on the way you looked at it, the color was different. Mostly it looked green, but from some angles it looked black...

 ... and in this blurry shot it looks blue.

I know, horrible picture, but look, you can see its tongue!

Yeah, that's what I'm resorting to today. I got a lot of pictures like this:

And this:

And I think it's saying something when the best picture I get of a bug is this:

And those are the ones I actually got pictures of!

But I do have some decent shots. There's always caterpillars:

 I saw this caterpillar today and thought I was finally going to get to see a white hickory tussock moth caterpillar moult! Its color was off (see the muddy brown?), and it was sitting in a really weird pose, with its back end up in the air. I watched it for a while and it was stretching out its rear prolegs, so that seemed like a really good sign. I pulled up a chair and watched a little longer - it was about a foot up from the ground, so a really awkward place to watch. And... nothing happened.

It kept flexing its prolegs, and stretching them out, but no shedding of skin took place. I eventually gave up and went on my merry bug walking way. I checked in hours later - still nothing. With monarchs, once they start, moulting is a pretty quick process, taking probably no more than a minute - the skin splits, they walk out of it, they eat it. Done. I don't know if this caterpillar was working on moulting or not, but I didn't see it happen.

 This WHTMC is still eating voraciously.

 And this caterpillar! That was a whole leaf last night!

 I goofed when I did my caterpillar day the other day - I forgot the camouflage looper! It was right there all this time, and I forgot to include it! I could have had 9 species! This one has been hanging from the bottom of the flower for several days. Another one preparing to moult? Preparing to pupate? Who knows?

 Someone else is voraciously eating.

Random Bugs:

 I can't say for sure, but it looks like this stinkbug on That Tree has its proboscis stuck in the trunk. So maybe what all the stinkbugs like about this tree is its sap?

 In this picture, the head of this hopper is on the right.

 In this picture, the head is on the left.

 Moth in the wild

The praying mantises are still hanging around in the bush out front:

 Just a view of the underside.

In the interest of being scientific, I went out after dark to look, and yes, at night the eyes are dark. It looks like it's wearing sunglasses.

I left the porch light on after my husband got home, just to see if there would be anything interesting out there. Just the usual suspects:

 There are too many moths that look basically like this for me to even bother trying to figure out what it is, but I can't help but wonder when I see one if I have ever seen the caterpillar version of it.

That seems like too small a pair of wings for that bug.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 While I was waiting for the caterpillar to do something, I spotted this mite on the tree. It walked by a number of times.

 I've zoomed this in quite a bit so you can appreciate how weird this thing is.

Different mite, same tree.

I still think this is a bizarre way to go about acquiring food...

Click HERE to read an interesting article from 2000 about Bioblitz in Hartford that year.