Sedate Expectations

I keep telling myself to do away with expectations about what I will find in the backyard, because I am almost never right, but I can't help it, they pop into my head. They constantly adjust and fluctuate while I am out there, as I see how things are, but I am constantly surprised.

Take today. It was a pretty nice day, the temperature was in the 50s as it has been all week, it wasn't raining but everything was still pretty damp after getting 2.75 inches of rain over two days. Good conditions for finding bugs, you'd think, even in December. Then I managed to walk around almost the entire backyard without finding anything (except for one tiny area, but more on that later). And then, when I was just about done, and headed to the mailbox to pick up my mail and go inside, I found all kinds of surprising things.

First of all, a new-to-me bug for Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Tiny beetle, maybe 1/8 inch long. At first I wasn't going to bother with it, because I didn't think it was anything interesting, and it was on the ground, and scurried off the rock it was on when I spotted it, into a crevice next to the rock - not a comfortable place to photograph. I was on my face in the mud, basically, to get these shots. But it was worth it, because I am pretty sure this is an insect I have never seen before, and it's quite handsome.

The one thing that I expected to see and did today was springtails. They like the wet weather, and I found them in a few spots, but particularly on a rock in the backyard that had a small puddle on it:

 These are so tiny - maybe a millimeter from front to back - and adorable.

 There are more here than you can see - there's one in the background on the left that you probably can't even see now that I have told you it's there, because it's out of focus...

 

 And when I looked at this picture on the computer I noticed something I had not seen when I took the picture...

 

 An even tinier creature!

 The come in two different color schemes. I still don't know if those are different species, or just variations in the same species. Or maybe male and female, I don't know.

 One of the fun things about springtails is that they skate on top of puddles. These two - different species, one adult, and the other young, I think, were on the same puddle. For some reason, something to do with surface tension or something, they kept being pushed together by some invisible force. They didn't like it.

 They'd get pushed together...

 ... and then spring apart.

 The reason springtails are called springtails is because they have an organ underneath their bodies that allows them to spring by pushing off. It's normally folded up against their body, but I think here you can see them both mid-spring - I think that's the springy organ sticking out behind each of them.

 ... and pushed back together...

Other bugs:

 Another springtail, on a tree trunk

 Winter firefly

 Rove beetle

 Aphid and ant

The award for Most Unexpected Sighting today should probably go to this grasshopper

 But this wasp was a pretty surprising find, too. There were actually 3 wasps of different species within a couple of inches of each other in the rock garden. I got pictures of two, this one, and...

...this one.

 I still don't know what this is, but I think it's waspish. Perhaps a female ready to lay eggs, or infected by a parasite?

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 I still occasionally see a bowl and doily spider around the yard, but lately they have not had the typical bowl-and-doily web. They hang out in places like the chicken wire around the garden.