Summer Signs

Aaaaaaaaah... I got my wish. When I was standing out on the back porch this evening listening to the crickets, I saw the first firefly of summer. I actually gasped. It was such a surprise, a lovely, blinking surprise. I feel like it's really summer now. And tomorrow it will be, meteorologically speaking, being June 1st.

And speaking of new beginnings:

 The two baby mourning doves sat quietly the whole time I was mowing the lawn under their tree, and a little while after I was done, when I was still nearby, I heard wings flapping. They each took a couple of experimental flights within the branches of the tree. Later on I went back to see if they had gone back to the nest, or were still elsewhere, and I didn't see them. I guess they flew away.

Backyard Bug of the Day:

 Another new species for me and my backyard! There have been quite a few of those lately, and it always makes me happy, and frankly amazes me. This is my 7th summer doing this, looking for bugs in my backyard, and it's incredible to me that I am still finding things I have never seen before. And yet, not incredible, because there are probably a LOT of bugs that are out there that I still have not seen before, even though I have been looking for them for all this time. Not to mention ones that just happen by on any given day. Still, it's exciting. I couldn't find this exact insect in my books, but it looks very much like a couple of leaf miner beetles, so this could be another species of leaf miner that is not shown in the books that I have.

 Leaf miners spend their larval stage living inside leaves.

Other Bugs:

 Sawfly larvae

 Fly of some kind, with a broken wing

 I think this is a frog hopper, but it might be a spittle bug.

 Sawfly larva

The enemy–Gypsy Moth Caterpillars:

 Fly

 Damselfly

I saw a little, yellow speck hovering above the grass:

 Finally, it landed.

 Craneflies. Female above, male below

 This moth's rolled-up leaf impression is so good its face looks like a leaf stem.

This is a pile of pollen on the bench of my picnic table. I was going to eat my lunch outside until I saw this.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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 Web of a bowl-and-doily spider

 And there's the spider.

 I almost ran this spider over with the lawnmower. I did run over another spider; I saw it after I hit it, and I didn't realize that I had actually hit it until I took a picture of it (it had scurried away a bit) and saw... well, let's just say the picture is too gruesome for me to post.

 I love this spider trying to make itself invisible by stretching out along the thread of its web.

 Jumping spider

Another species of jumping spider