Day 4 of the heat wave, and I am getting tired of being hot and sweaty all the time, so when we were making our plans to go out for the day, I decided to do my bug walk in the early evening when we got home, rather than in the heat and sunshine of the afternoon before going out. So, I changed the lens on my camera for my excursion, removing the macro lens I use for taking pictures of bugs, and putting on what I call the regular lens, because I don't know what else to call it (I have the macro lens, a telephoto lens, and a regular lens, which zooms, but not a lot). Then, I went outside to get in the car and found the Backyard Bug of the Day on the driveway.
Backyard Bug of the Day:
Red-spotted purple butterfly. The most beautiful butterfly ever to appear in my backyard. I have seen them around a few times this year, but this is the first time I have been able to get a picture that really shows how it looks. Of course, it would have been better to get MUCH closer, but I'm taking what I can get. It landed, and flew, and landed, and flew, and this went on for a few minutes while my husband waited in the car. This is the closest I got.
I presume that the reason it is called a red-spotted purple is because of the dots on the underside of the wings...
... but even here, zoomed in on the above picture, those are not red dots, they're orange, and there is no purple. So... I don't know what they were thinking when they named this. Unless I am wrong about the identification, in which case... oh well.
Here's the first picture zoomed in. So pretty! Finally, a blue butterfly in my backyard! It's no blue morpho, but it's the best I'm going to get, not living in a tropical rainforest.
Let's get back to mushrooms for a moment, while I break a rule of this blog. One of my rules is that I only post pictures on the day they were taken, but in this case I want to do a compare-and-contrast thing, so I am going to post some from yesterday and the day before, to show how much the mushrooms change–until recent years, when I started paying attention to the things living around me, I had no idea mushrooms were so dynamic.
Here's one from today:
Same mushrooms yesterday:
Today:
Two days ago:
Today:
Two days ago:
Today:
Two days ago:
Today:
Two days ago:
Other Bugs:
Moth
Click beetle
Can you see three bugs in this picture?
This bug looks familiar, except for the colors. Obviously a Hemiptera nymph of some kind, and I have seen this shape before, but not in this color.
Another Hemiptera nymph
This is a bad picture of a red-headed ash borer beetle, but it's interesting because of what we're actually seeing here: I think this is a female laying eggs in the bark of the tree.
It's not a good thing that she's laying eggs in this tree; from what I have read, they lay their eggs in trees that are sick, dead, or dying. To be honest, this tree doesn't look so great lately. There were actually 5 of these beetles on the trunk of the tree today, two mating pairs, and one random male who came in and busted everything up. When all the others scurried off (and they look just like ants when they do that–those legs are so not beetlish), this one started laying her eggs.
Sweat bee
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