Snow Bugs

Of all of the unexpected things I have seen in the backyard, this may take the cake.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Yes, that is a moth in the snow. I have no idea what it's doing there. I went out to clean the first bit of our current blizzard off the driveway before my husband got home (because driving on the snow leads to ice later), and found this moth crawling around on the snow.

 I don't know where it came from, or why it left whatever cozy nook it was in to go for a walk in the snow, but there it was.

 I may have been projecting, but it seemed kind of like it was struggling to move, though it made pretty good time. It toppled over once, and had a bit of a struggle righting itself (I helped).

 I know I am all about nature taking its course, but I couldn't help it. I brought it in the house.  I set it on the table in the foyer while I went out to finish my bit of shoveling. When I came in it was not there, so I have no idea where it is now. I suppose it's a bit ironic, given how much I try to avoid letting moths in the house.

If this blizzard plays out like the forecasts predict (and I don't really think it will), this ladybug pupa may be buried under the snow by tomorrow night. I presume that it can take it (snow is actually a good insulator, so it will keep it warm if the temperature plunges). Of all of the various bugs whose location for waiting out the winter is known to me, this is the one that is the most exposed. I have to trust that the larva knew what it was doing when it chose this spot to pupate. On the other hand, there was another that chose a leaf on a tree; the leaf has since fallen, and who knows where it is now. But nature knows what it's doing right?

Feathered

There were no bugs today; it was too cold. But I spent a little time in the backyard, and there was a curious incident.

As I mentioned a while ago, I got a new camera for Christmas, a pair of binoculars with a camera in them, and I am still trying to figure out how to get decent pictures out of it. It's harder than it sounds. Anyway, there were a lot of birds in the backyard today, so I thought it would be a good time to go out and try to get pictures, since taking pictures with the binocular camera through my dirty windows doesn't work very well. The birds were uncooperative, though, mostly flying away when I came anywhere near, and the  late afternoon sunshine muted by a thin layer of clouds wasn't really bright enough for good pictures, but some chickadees landed in a tree near me, so I tried to take their picture.

I forgot to change the focus setting on the camera (it has two settings, near and far), so the pictures didn't come out so well:

Nice action, though.

So, while I was taking pictures of the chickadees, I heard a woodpecker tapping on a tree behind me, and I turned around to try to get a picture of that.
Those pictures didn't come out at all:

Sigh... So dreary.

 Anyway, while I was taking pictures of the woodpeckers (it turns out there were two of them), one of the chickadees flew away. And how did I know that with my back turned? Because it flew so close behind me that its wing brushed the back of my neck. I have NO idea why it did that. I can come up with some anthropomorphized answers: it resented the fact that I turned away from it to take pictures of the woodpeckers (though if that is the case, it should have been more cooperative in the first place), it did it because it was dared to by the other chickadee, it did it because it thought it would be funny to tease the 'birdwatcher' that way. Maybe it was an act of aggression, a warning? I really don't know. I can think of no reasonable explanation why a wild animal would brush up against a human on purpose, but I also can't think of a reason why it would have happened accidentally. But there it is - today I had a close encounter of the third kind with a chickadee.

Life is so full of mysteries...

Board Meeting

 I haven't been spending much time outside lately. We're not having a polar vortex, or anything like that, but January is the coldest month of the year here, and it's been a little colder than normal, which means that it has been a while since the temperature has been above freezing. Therefore, there's not much point in going out looking for bugs. Yesterday, though we had a bit of a thaw, and the rain washed away almost all of the little snow we had. I couldn't go out looking for bugs then, because it was raining and I was out most of the day, but today, to my surprise and contrary to the weather forecast (of course), it hit 40ºF, so I figured I should go see if there were any bugs around.

I have been curious, you see, in my I'm-pretending-to-be-scientific-even-though-I-am-not-a-scientist way, to see what would be out there one a warmer day after an extended freeze. So, we had the freeze, and now two warmer (let's not kid ourselves - it was not WARM, just warmER) days. There were some springtails and some sort of fly on the porch last night, so I had hopes for today. In other winters, when I was not actively surveying the bug landscape in the backyard, I have noticed that when the temperature gets into the 40s, no matter the point in winter, there are usually bugs to be seen flying around the backyard. Well, nobody was flying today. But there was life.

The caterpillar in the package bin, for instance, has shifted spots again, and I am guessing is hiding under the dried leaves, because I couldn't see it. I guess it was warm enough yesterday and today for it to thaw out.

And of course I checked up on the cricket under the board:

 I never actually saw it during the deep freeze, because the times I tried to look either the board was frozen to the ground or there was ice in the little hollow where the cricket lives (which seems smaller now... don't know why...), but today when I flipped the board it moved, so it's not in diapause right now.

The cricket was not alone, though:

I didn't get a good shot of this, or even a good look, but it's definitely an arthropod of some kind.

Then there were these:

 Some kind of springtail, maybe?

Everything else under there was an arachnid, so we'll get to them in a moment. But first, the bugs in the house:

 Here's a bit of trivia for you - computer bugs are called computer bugs because early in the development of computers there was once a malfunction cause by a moth that flew into a computer and shorted something out. Computers were much bigger back then (and apparently had openings that moths could fly into). This ladybug, however, did not short out my laptop.

 Arachnid Appreciation:
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 The surprise of the day was a spider active under the cricket's board.

 I found a couple of these, too - I think they are mites.

 And I am not sure if this is a spider or a baby daddy-long-legs.

But there were two of them. And this one seems to be very obtuse for a predator.

I checked up on Rain Gauge Spider, too, when I emptied the rain gauge. She's still inside her silk tent, but I know she's alive because she's moved since the last time I checked on her.

We're going back down to freezing again tomorrow. This wasn't the most glorious January Thaw ever, but I will take what I can get. The days are getting longer, and we're almost 2/3 of the way through my least favorite month. Spring will come. Eventually.

Burrowing

We got our first real snow of the winter today. By real snow I mean enough to cover the grass, and it didn't melt by the end of the day. And I had to shovel it. (Not that I am complaining. I like shoveling snow the first few storms each year. In general I don't start hating it until March). Anyway, it was somewhere between two and three inches, I would guess, closer to two probably. I imagine it goes without saying that I didn't see any bugs (except for the frozen woolly bear).

But not everything is sleeping for the winter:

 The lawn part of the backyard is covered with these snow tunnels. I presume they are from mice, but I think there might be shrews in the yard, and it could be them, too.

This is a pretty unusual sight for the backyard, partly because with deeper snow you don't see the tunnels underneath until it has melted quite a bit. I guess we got just the right amount of snow for the rodents to need to burrow under and have the tunnels be visible from above.

By the way, I got a new camera for Christmas:

It's not quite as high quality as my regular camera, but it does have an interesting feature, which is that it is a pair of binoculars that takes pictures. As you can see from the very poor quality of this picture, I haven't quite finessed it yet. And I think it doesn't take good pictures through dirty window, unfortunately. But it may make taking pictures of birds in the backyard a bit easier. We'll see.

It's Just Looking for Something to Read

As you know, I live near the woods, and in a place where there are a lot of bugs, so it's not all that surprising that we get bugs in the house. But sometimes I find a bug and have to ask, "How did you get in here?" Mind you, they never answer. And the emphasis in the question is on "you" because I have given up wondering how bugs get in here in general, I just wonder at the appearance of unusual specimens. Ladybugs, for instance, are not surprising to me in the winter. Wasps are not surprising to me in the winter (though we haven't had any so far this year). Spiders are never surprising.

This is surprising:

I think this might be a plume moth, but I am not sure, because it's a little bit different from the way the others I have seen look. But it is obviously related. Moths are a bit rare lately, even on the front porch, so I have to wonder where this came from. At any rate, not what I expected to see on my living room bookshelves. (Edit: I found another site about plume moths that had more pictures, and it appears that this is, indeed, a plume moth).

Nice to be able to find a cool bug without going outside.

Ice Sculpture

I did NOT go out looking for bugs today. I didn't even want to go out to get the mail today. I think the high was 23ºF and painfully windy (as I write this my weather sensor says it is 0.9ºF. And falling). Not good bug weather. However, while I was out there getting the mail I thought maybe I would check to see what the cricket under the board was up to, and I spotted something interesting:

 This is something I have seen before - ice crystals growing from the ground. You probably can't tell from the picture, but they are at least two inches long. The rock in the upper right of the picture appears to have been pushed up by them. I know there is a name for this kind of ice, but I don't know what it is. It mostly happens when the temperature gets really cold after a lot of rain - in muddy areas, particularly. There were a lot of these crystals around here the winter we built our house, because the building area was dirt, which, of course, becomes mud when it rains, and produces a lot of these cool crystals when it freezes.

As for the cricket, the board was frozen to the ground, so I don't know. It's probably best I leave it alone, though, to preserve what little warmth there is. If there is any.

 We had a powdered sugar dusting of snow yesterday, and it's unusual for that kind of snow to stick around, even if the temperature is a bit below freezing, because the sun will usually melt it. But not today.

I did spot a bug today, as you see. The woolly bear caterpillar living in the package bin has shifted again, as I noticed a couple of days ago, no longer hiding under the leaves. I would imagine it is frozen solid by now.

What a strange existence...

Trails

I have lately come to regard the weather forecast as the bug forecast - if the temperature is supposed to be above 40ºF, I assume it will be at least partly buggy outside. If it's supposed to rain, I figure I won't be able to go out. If it is supposed to be warm(ish), and raining, I hope that there will be a break in the rain so I can go out. Well, today was supposed to be in the high 50s and pouring, so I thought it would be warm enough for bugs, but I might not be able to go out. Instead, it only drizzled in the early afternoon, and was in the high 30s - which is not good bug weather (The heavy rain and warmth came later. It is 11:26 in the evening and 49ºF right now). But you know me, the eternal optimist, so I went out to look anyway.

As I am sure you can guess, it was not a fruitful search today, but there was still interest and beauty to be found:

 Don't worry, arachnophobes, no spiders, just spider webs. One thing I have read about spiders is that wherever they go, they trail a line of silk as kind of a safety line, and a quick anchor in case they need to jump off somewhere to escape in a hurry. In consequence, as you see, somewhere where a spider has been walking back and forth can be covered with silk lines. And then when it rains, those silk lines look beautiful. You can tell that the thorns of all different lengths on this vine made for a very erratic up and down path for whatever spider came by here.

The only arthropod (it gets harder and harder for me to call things bugs when I know they are not only not bugs, but no even insects) life I found today was a few springtails.

 I don't know if you've noticed in other pictures of springtails, but they are covered with tiny hairs...

Zoomed in you can see the effect of a misty rain on those hairs...

We're headed for a big freeze tomorrow. Don't expect to see any bugs for a while. I certainly don't.

Happy New Year!

Oops! I almost forgot I had a blog post to write tonight!

Happy New Year, Bug Fans! This greeting is a day late because I didn't go out looking for bugs on New Year's Day, because, like the rest of the week, it was too freaking cold. Not that I am such a wimp, but the temperature hasn't been above freezing since... well, my last blog post, which was almost a week ago. I am pretty sure there's no point in looking for bugs if the temperature is below freezing.

 Sigh... Is it too soon to be longing for springtime?

Today it was a balmy 39ºF, so since I was outside anyway working on something, I figured I might as well walk around and look for some bugs. I have been curious for a while about what the effect would be on bug-finding of a day a bit above freezing after an extended time below, and today was the day to find out. There have been a few days so far this winter that didn't get warmer than about 34ºF, but there hasn't been a stretch of almost a week below freezing, and though 39ºF is not exactly warm, it was worth a shot to look, I thought.

Then I realized that it really wasn't worth a shot, because there was nothing out there. At least, that is how it appeared. But eventually I found this:

 One solitary gnat on the garden shed.

I actually had to go inside to get my camera to take a picture - I so little expected to find anything that I hadn't brought it outside. And then I wondered if it was worth it for a gnat. But for the purposes of documenting bug life in the backyard in the winter, I did.

I checked on the Cricket Under the Board, too:

 Still alive and active. If you can call sitting in a hole under a piece of wood active. I didn't want that piece of wood to be sitting there all winter, but I can't exactly move it now. This is the punishment of not cleaning up completely after the summer project in the summer. Now I have this piece of wood sitting next to the house until spring thaw. Anyway, seeing as the temperature is above freezing I did expect the cricket to still be 'awake,' but I checked anyway.

I found a couple of these on a tree:

 Small cocoonish blobs of silk, with something lumpy underneath. They are only about 1/8 of an inch wide - the cocoons, not the lumps. Those are much smaller, obviously. I don't know if these are cocoons, or if they are eggs sacs, or what.

I found a ladybug on the roof...

And another in the fish tank later, doing the backstroke. It was duly rescued and sent outside.

Tomorrow we are expecting a couple of inches of snow, followed by a few more inches of rain. That is to say, the forecast says so. I never completely expect what the forecast says we are going to have. I guess I'll just have to wait and see.