Life Goes On

The weather yo-yo was on the way back up today, so there was a lot of insect activity in the backyard. I could hear it as soon as I walked out the back door.

Apparently it was warm enough for a cold-blooded vertebrate to be out and about, too:

 This frog does a really good impression of a dried leaf. So good that I almost stepped on it, which made it leap out of my way, and even when it leaped, I thought it was just a dried leaf blowing across the path. I don't know what made me look at it again when it landed, but even then I did a double take before realizing that it was not a dried leaf. Obviously you know that it's a frog, but I am sure you can see how well it blends in with the other leaves on the ground.

 After this shot it jumped away into more leaf litter, and I couldn't find it again. That's how good it is at looking like a dried leaf.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Rove beetles. I have never seen a group of them together like this. There were at least twenty, if not more, on this rock (and naturally they dispersed when I was trying to take their picture).

 This one looks like it has something on its head, a mite or something...

 Inconclusive, though, if that's what it is. Bear in mind that these rove beetles were really small - I would say less than a quarter of an inch long. So imagine how small that mite would be. And the rove beetle would not sit still for me to get a closer shot.

 One tumbled on its back. That may have been my fault.

One of the things I have learned since I started observing the bugs, other wildlife, and nature in general in my backyard is that I have been making assumptions about things my entire life without realizing that I was assuming anything. Take... life, for instance. I think that I always thought that animals (and I am including insects in this, because they are animals) have their young in the spring, and then in the case of something like an insect, which I always assumed would die in the winter, they would live out their lives in the summer and fall, and then... that's it. I did always wonder how we had new bugs in the spring if the cold weather killed all of the bugs, but I still did think that insects lived out their lives from spring to fall, and then that was it for them. I didn't know that a lot of insects live through the winter, and it also never occurred to me that some insects would lay eggs in the fall that would hatch in the spring, that the eggs could last over the winter. Now I know that a lot of insects keep their life cycles going from year to year by doing this. There are currently egg masses of gypsy moths all over my yard, waiting for me to find the spray that will kill them before they can hatch in the spring. But besides that, there were a lot of insects preparing the next generation for springtime in my backyard today:

 A pair of what I think are March flies, mating.

The female is on the left, the male on the right. They are sexually dimorphic - the males have bigger heads and eyes. Actually, their heads appear to be mostly eyes.

 I think what is happening here is that on the left is a pair that have already mated, and the male is guarding over the female to keep other males from displacing his genetic material, and the other one, on the right, wants to mate with the female.

 Different species of fly, mating. These were underneath the hummingbird feeder, which drips what is essentially sugar water on the ground and plants underneath, and has been a haven for ants and flies for the last couple of weeks. I just haven't gotten any good pictures of this situation.

 And here is a female tree cricket depositing eggs in the trunk of a tree with her ovipositor.

 

 Another case moth caterpillar. The second one I have seen this year. And this time you can see the head of the caterpillar.

 I saw a LOT of candy striped leaf hoppers today:

 I only got pictures of a few of them - the warm weather made them feisty and uncooperative. This was the most I have seen all year - so many I lost count.

 Striped garden caterpillar makes another appearance.

Ladybeetle

 

 I found this unfortunate cricket on the stone stairs out in front of the yard.

 It is oozing something out of its head.

 It looks like its head and eye are smooshed in. It was alive, and walking around, so I don't know what will happen to it, if it can recover from that, but I feel bad for it, and I wonder how that could happen to it.

I did a little bit of gardening today, planting some bulbs, and I started by raking back the leaf litter in one of the garden beds. I only cleared a couple of square feet or so, and found some interesting things underneath (which makes me point about why you should leaf at least some of the leaf litter in your yard, instead of raking everything up to be sent to a landfill). Mostly there were sowbugs, but there was also this:

 A caterpillar that perhaps planned to overwinter in the leaf litter (don't worry, after I planted my bulbs, I put the leaf litter back). I don't know if it is going to overwinter like this, or make a cocoon in the leaf litter.

 For what else I saw when I pulled back the leaf litter, you will have to keep scrolling for Arachnid Appreciation:
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 I saw a couple of spiders when I was planting bulbs, but this beauty is the only one I got a picture of.

 I don't know what kind of spider this is, but these always look fake to me, like a kid put on the eyes with a magic marker.

I saw a few jumping spiders today:

 

 

 This one had caught something.