A Pleasant Surprise

LOOK!

A crocus! Almost blooming! I actually gasped when I saw this today as I was walking out to get the mail. It was a completely unexpected joy to see this. If I thought my eyes were hungry for green, well, they were starving for a sign of life such as this. The crocuses in the backyard are still buried under snow, and though the snow has receded from along the front walkway, I thought it would be a while before we saw anything blooming there, either. But now it looks like there will be something blooming there tomorrow. What a wonderful thing is spring!

Crocus notwithstanding, it still felt like winter when I went out to get the mail, and this was almost two o'clock in the afternoon, with the temperature in the high 30s, so I wasn't going to bother with a bug walk. But it warmed up a little bit later, and the sun made a very brief appearance, and then I saw this:

Fly on the window. Outside. I also saw quite a few tiny winged things flit past the window, so I figured the bugs must be out and about, and I should be, too.

So, I went out, and it turns out that the bugs were excessively uncooperative today, refusing to land, or taking off immediately if I saw them sitting somewhere, or in every way they could think of avoiding allowing me to take a good picture. But eventually I found a couple that were too occupied with other things to make the effort to thwart me.

Backyard Bugs of the Day:

 Propagating the species.

I find this anatomically confusing regarding the legs.

 Here's something interesting. See on the bug on the left, there is a round, light colored appendage on the side right about where the thorax and the abdomen meet? (If you don't know which is the thorax, and which is the abdomen, just consider that the third body segment is the head, and you'll know enough for the purposes of this discussion).

Now look at this next picture:

You can't see that little appendage in this one, and that is because the bug was waving it back and forth really fast, so it's just a blur in the picture. From something I read once those are vestigal wings, but I don't remember what they are called, or what their function is (I thought it had something to do with flying, but there must be some other use, considering the bug was flapping them while not flying). Anyway, very curious.

Random Bugs:

 Looper

 Winter firefly

 I don't really understand why you'd want that thing covering your head completely, because it blocks the view of possible predators, but some beetles have it.

 This fly was delving into the plant stem with some sort of appendage. My uninformed guess would be that it was using an ovipositor to lay eggs, or it was sucking something out of it.

A pair of what I think were herons flew over.

 Cute, weird fungus inside a dead branch.

 The melting of the snow pack has revealed an irksome sight: some little animal burrowed through the grass under all of that snow. It's not looking good for the grass. As you know, I am not a big fan of lawns, but I do have a bit of one in the backyard, and I prefer to have grass instead of muddy bare ground. Well, maybe it'll grow back...

Arachnid Appreciation:
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My first sighting of a spider in the wild this spring!

 It's a real cutie.