Hit the Snooze Alarm

Everyone has those days, once in a while, where everything just goes wrong, and you just have to say, "I should have stayed in bed!". I was thinking about that today, not because I was having a bad day, but because I spend more time than the average person thinking about the concerns of insects, and I was thinking about what it must be like to be an insect that hibernates or pupates during the winter. When I have One of Those Days, and want to crawl back into my bed and pretend the day never happened, I can usually do that - eventually. But if you are a bug who spent the winter pupating, once you emerge, that's it. You're out there. You can't crawl back into the cocoon, or chrysalis, or whatever you call your particular pupation chamber (that last bit is not a thing. I just made it up because I don't know if all pupating insects have chrysalides or cocoons). As for hibernators, I don't know. If they wake up, and come out from wherever they are hiding, I don't know if they can go back to hibernating if the situation calls for it. I hope so. Because there have been bugs out and about during the warmer weather last week, but the last couple of days it has been really cold again, and tomorrow it is supposed to snow. So any bugs that have crawled out of their winter blankets must have been saying, "I should have stayed in bed!"

I wonder, though, if that happens. I mean, obviously there are bugs that have been emerging in the last two weeks, the ones that are most surprising to me being the looper caterpillars I have seen, but Nature would not let them come out just to freeze, would she? And from what I have read about pupating insects - mantids and moths, anyway, is that there have to be sustained warm temperatures for a couple of weeks for them to come out.  I think that would include overnight temperatures. But this is New England. The weather can change on you out of the blue. It can be nice and warm for three weeks and suddenly it's freezing again. If you were a polyphemus moth that had emerged thinking it was spring, only to be met with a blizzard in April or May (it has happened!), surely you would be longing to crawl back into your cocoon and hit the snooze alarm for June.

Anyway, that's what I have been pondering today. Mostly because The Cricket is awake, but still under the board, and because the Woolly Bear Caterpillar in the Package Bin is still curled up in the bottom of the bin. While I have been getting excited about the slow melting of the snow pack (which has not done much melting in the last three days), they have possibly been hitting the snooze alarm on spring, knowing that there is more snow coming.

Tomorrow is the other first day of spring, by the way, for those of you who appreciate irony.

I wasn't going to bother looking for bugs today, because it barely got above freezing, but I decided to take a peek under the board, thinking there might be some action under there, because it's sheltered, and it was in the sun, so might have been warm. It was worth the effort.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Some kind of ground beetle, I think. It was really small. And really fast. I was lucky to get a picture of it in focus. There were actually two of them, but the other one disappeared into the grass before I got a picture.

Zoomed in...

There were a couple of other bugs under there, too (in addition to The Cricket, a paragon of patience):

 I don't know if this fly was under there when I flipped it, or if it landed there while I was looking around. Anyway, it flew away after I took its picture.

The most interesting thing I saw when I flipped the board was this:

 Spider webs woven among the flattened grass. (Don't worry, arachnophobes, the spider is not on the web in any of these shots). One thing I find interesting about the under-the-board environment is that there is very often condensation on the things under there.

Like this:

I wasn't going to post a picture of The Cricket today, but it illustrates the condensation thing quite nicely.

Anyway, here's a couple of zoomed-in shots of the webs:

I love that the light is refracted into different colors depending on the angle at which you look at it - green or purple.

Arachnid Appreciation:.
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I went out a second time to look under the board, and on that occasion found this spider. At first it was doing that hide-under-your-own-legs thing...

But then it stretched out. And then, I looked away for a second, and when I looked back, it had disappeared.

It's really unnerving when spiders do that...