In A Strange Light

You may have had this experience before: there is someone you know, not particularly well, but you see them on a regular basis. You only see them in one context, though, maybe someone from work, or church, or swimming laps at the local pool. Then one day you see them somewhere else, and they are dressed differently than they are when you usually see them; instead of being dressed nicely for work or church, they are in jeans in a t-shirt; instead of a bathing suit, they are in regular clothes. And you almost don't recognize them, because you are not used to seeing them that way. Well, that is how I feel about my backyard in the morning. I hardly ever do my bug walk in the morning, it is almost always late afternoon or even evening. And when I go out there in the morning, it looks really different. When the sun is shining from the other side of the backyard the shadows are in different places; spots that are sunny in the afternoon are shady, and there are spots that are bright where I normally see shade. It's quite a different perspective of the same place.

In case you hadn't guessed, I did my bug walk in the morning today. But before I did that, I managed to sneak out onto the porch without being seen by the robins and take a picture of the babies in the nest:

 The babies did not react at all.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

 I thought when I took this picture that this was a wasp. I didn't get any closer than this...

 ... but when I looked at it on the computer I realized that it was actually a fly. A huge one, the size of a wasp. This is a new species for me and my backyard, I think.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

 I am not sure what these are, exactly, some kind of planthopper, I think. But there's a lot of interesting stuff here. First of all, these are nymphs, and that white fluff is a waxy secretion that they produce. I don't know why, I think I read somewhere once that it had to do with defense.

 This was on the same plant, and I realized that this was probably the adult version of the same bugs.

Side view–such a pretty bug!

 This is when I was sure that these are the adult version of those bugs–it appears that one of them has recently molted into its adult form, and that is a discarded exoskeleton above.

Other Bugs:

 I think this is the first long-legged fly I have seen this year.

Lately I have been running into (well, almost walking into, really) a lot of dangly caterpillars...

 You can see very clearly how many pairs of prolegs this has–four in the middle and one on the back, which makes this a caterpillar, meaning the larva of a butterfly or moth.

 Another caterpillar

 All but one of the tent caterpillars were in a pile on the bottom of the tent. I don't know why this one was on top all alone.

 Hopper nymph, without ant attendants today.

 Aphid guarding its young

 A couple of sawfly larvae. I think the black specks on their backs are their own frass.

 I spotted this extremely uncooperative caterpillar on a leaf. It flung itself off the leaf and quickly descended to the ground when I got closer...

 It took me a minute to figure out why it looks so weird here...

 Then I realized that it is upside down. Those are its legs, this is the belly view.

 A couple of spittle bugs...

 I took this picture, so I was obviously watching this moment, but it happened so fast that I did not see it. I think she was trying to use her wings to get him off her back.

 I thought at first that this was a beetle, but I think it might be some kind of Hemiptera instead.

 

 Fly nibbling on moss

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 I found this spider on my friend Karen's shirt. She moved it to this plant, and it obviously wanted to be somewhere else, because it immediately sent out a silk thread to try to move elsewhere.

 I spotted this web when I went out to get the mail, and when I saw it, there was a spider walking around on the edges of it. When I went back out with my camera for my bug walk, I realized that the spider I saw walking around on it before was not the owner of the web; it was a completely different species of spider. By the end of my bug walk this spider had built a completely new web.