The Bugs in the Backyard: It's a Small, Small, Small World

Today it would have been so easy to forget that it is mid-autumn instead of mid-spring.

It was warm, it was sort of sunny, everything was wet because it rained a little bit in the morning... and there were some flowers blooming...

But I couldn't forget.

Because there are a half billion of these everywhere.

It is kind of funny that today was the day that (according to last week's long range forecast) we were supposed to get snow. We didn't get snow; it was about 30º too warm for that. It didn't entice a lot of bugs out, though. There was one thing that almost all of the bugs I saw today have in common, though: they were tiny, tiny, tiny.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

I think this is a miniscule moth, but it's so tiny I can't really tell if it's a moth. But it looks like one. Or, having just flipped open a bug book and seen something that looks just like this, it could be a greenhouse whitefly, though the description doesn't sound likely, as it says the greenhouse whitefly can't survive frost, and we had frost this week.

I see them flitting around a lot, but they don't like to land, and when they do, they really don't like to have their picture taken.

I found a LOT of springtails today:

The amazing thing about this is that as tiny as this is, and we are talking about a creature that is about 1 millimeter long (I can go metric when I don't want to deal with fractions of inches), while I was trying to get this shot I saw something even smaller moving around in the corner of the shot. Whatever that thing was I didn't get a picture, and I don't think I would have been able to see anything - I am not sure that smaller thing was something I could see without magnification. It was maybe the size of one of the paint specks in this picture, but I think it was smaller. It got away before I could even try to get a good look at it. And it was white, so you can see why it would be hard to find on this background.

Here's that one zoomed in. These are so adorable.

There are two different kinds of springtail here. If the other one is a springtail, and it might not be. It could be some kind of louse.

There were several different patterns on the springtails I saw, and I got pics of a couple of them, but not all. There were a lot of them around today. (There's two in this picture).

Mostly I have been finding them on the lawn furniture, but today I actually found some on plants. Near the lawn furniture.

I love this one - it looks like it's made of circuit boards.

Here it is zoomed in.

Random Bugs:

The ladybug I saw was not tiny. It was normal ladybug sized.

Case moth caterpillars are always tiny as far as I can tell. Even though they are getting bigger. They are also the only caterpillars I am still finding in the yard.

This wasp is definitely not tiny.

But this hopper is.

And this one.

This is something I have never seen before - a buffalo tree hopper that is brown instead of green. I don't know if this is a variation, or do they change colors? It looks more like a buffalo in brown.

Daily Dandelion and hoverfly.

For the first time in ages there was a moth attracted to the porch light tonight.

Here's a zoomed in look at another shot, because it shows the scales on its wings really well.

Eggs.

Even all of the spiders I found today were tiny. So here's some tiny Arachnid Appreciation:
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This is a tiny jumping spider, so tiny I wasn't completely sure it was a spider until I looked at it through my camera. I have never seen a jumping spider this small. However, even smaller than the spider is the springtail it has in its grip, which I think is kind of adorable. There's probably something wrong me because of that...