All Wet

I don't know if I have ever mentioned before (I probably have) that I am photovoltaic - I draw my energy from the sun. If I go three days without it, I become sluggish. Today is day three of gloom. I am procrastinating on writing this blog because I don't want to bend down to pick up my bug books off the floor to look up today's Backyard Bug of the Day. It would be too much work (I am actually typing this lying down. I am getting a crick in my neck, but I don't care because the alternative is to sit up). So maybe I am not even going to try to identify today's Backyard Bug of the Day.

Here's what I saw in the backyard today:

 Rain.

 Here's something fun I learned: droplets of rain on pokeberries get dyed pink. Actually, pretty much anything that touches pokeberries gets dyed pink...

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I'm pretty sure I have seen it in the book. I think I have even looked it up before. I should know what it's called. But I don't.

 As you can see from the background, and probably from the lighting, I had to resort to using the porch light to get a BBotD today. Well, I had another I could have used, but I felt I needed to do better. I only had a brief window of opportunity to have a bug walk today, because it rained almost all day. Even the porch light barely attracted any bugs. It's pathetic.

Okay, fine, I looked it up. It appears to be a species of caddisfly. I know more about the larvae of caddisflies than the adults, because I did some reading on the subject about twenty years ago when I made some puppets for a museum (Yes, I made a caddisfly larva puppet! I wish I had a picture of THAT to post). So I know they are aquatic (the larvae, not the adults), I know they build little houses for themselves out of various materials like bits of plant matter and tiny stones, which they glue together with silk. And I know they are biotic indicators, which means that they can be used to judge the health of an ecosystem. Caddisfly larvae are sensitive to pollution, so if there are a lot of caddisflies in a stream, the stream is in pretty good shape. If there aren't any... that could indicate a problem. Anyway, obviously I didn't learn what the adults look like, because I had to look this up.

Random Bugs:

 Remember that plant from yesterday with the three bumblebees on it? I don't think they have moved.

 I feel kind of melancholy about this caterpillar. It has parasitic wasp eggs on its other side, and so all of the eating it is doing in order to grown and change into a moth (or butterfly, I was never able to figure out what this one is), will be for nothing, because it is going to nourish the moth larvae instead. But the caterpillar doesn't know this.

 Small milkweed bug.

 This ladybug is like the insect version of the Batman villain Two Face. I don't know why it looks like this (and though I tried, I was not able to get a better picture), but it's interesting.

 Cranefly on the storm door in the porch light. I love when bugs land on the storm door (or windows) so I can take pictures of them from the underside. This cranefly is missing a leg. I am going to guess that the hook-like end of its abdomen is involved in mating.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 I find this amusing because it's the same web from yesterday, same spider - different leaf. So the spider got the other leaf out of there, and a new one just fell into its place.