The Plunge

I don't like to complain (though I do it a lot), and I hate to keep going on about the weather (which I also do a lot–I like weather, and it is often pertinent to the subject of insects) but I am pretty disappointed in how nature turned out today. I thought that today was going to be like yesterday, rainy and warm, and then the forecast changed to say that it would be in the 50s again, but the rain would end in the morning, and I was extremely psyched because warm air, plus not raining, and maybe some sunshine thrown in, and I was sure to find a lot of cool bugs today! But here's what happened: the rain did, in fact, end in the morning. And the sun did come out. But the temperature, while it did peak at 58ºF, did so early in the morning, and then began to plummet. At 8:00 in the morning it was 58ºF. By noon it was 36ºF. I went out to do my bug walk at about 12:30. By then it was too cold for the bugs, and they had gone back into their cozy nooks (if they had ever come out) and I didn't find much at all.

I did, finally, find one winter firefly:

 That's it's back end sticking out of an ironic place: a hole made in a tree trunk by a woodpecker (I think) that was probably looking for insects to eat (I assume). And instead, it made a little perch for this winter firefly to sit in the sunshine for a while.

I found two flies:

 This is on one of the rocks down by the street, which, particularly when it's sunny, is a warmer spot than the rest of the yard.

 Basking on a tree trunk.

Other than a couple of springtails that I found under a piece of wood (and were moving too fast to be photographed), and a few things I saw in flight, that's it. Oh, if only the temperature could have waited a few hours to drop, or just not dropped so fast! Alas. Well, the interesting thing (besides how fast and how much the temperature dropped today–it was 22ºF by 9 pm, dropping 35 degrees in 13 hours), is that the snow in the backyard was completely gone. Not even a stray patch in the cooler shaded areas. And between late Thursday night and this morning we got 2.5 inches of rain. If it had been been below freezing that would have been about a foot of snow. Winter is so interesting.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Not a spider, but a mite, scurrying around on a tree trunk.