Big Bugs

Today the most striking bugs in my backyard were the biggest. Since this is not a tropical rainforest (though it sure feels like one at the moment), we don't get a lot of huge bugs here (probably to the relief of most people living in this latitude, but hey, it would be interesting), but we have a couple of pretty good sized bugs. One of them is one that I hear a lot this time of year but rarely see (you can guess what that is), and the other is just a large species of an order that I see fairly regularly. You can probably guess what the first one is, and it has already been Backyard Bug of the Day this year:

 Cicada. The cicadas we get around here are dog day cicadas, which are an annual cicada. They spend one year underground as larvae, and they emerge as adults (well, they emerge and then molt to their adult form) every year, as opposed to periodical cicadas, which emerge at longer intervals (there are 8-year and 17-year that I know of). Notable to me is that I have photographed cicadas on three days this week, and have seen them I think five times this summer. That is just about equal to the number of total times I have seen a cicada in my backyard in the previous 17 summers. Unlike the others I have photographed this summer, this one (after flitting from one plant to another nearby) was willing to sit still while I took a lot of pictures of it, close-up and quite intrusive.

The second big insect I found in my backyard today is the Backyard Bug of the Day:

 

 This might be a new dragonfly for me. It is a shadow darner. It is quite a big dragonfly; I think if it was sitting on the palm of my hand the wings would probably go past the edge.

Side view. This is the take-a-picture-from-far-away-in-case-it-won't-let-me-get-closer shot.

 Coincidentally, less than a minute before I spotted the Backyard Bug of the Day dragonfly, I found this one, which was quite small.

There are three species of caterpillars that are basically ubiquitous in the backyard lately, and today I found all three on the same crab apple tree:

 1) White hickory tussock moth caterpillars. Every year about this time I find them all over the yard, and in particular all over the trunk of this tree.

 

 2) Fall webworm caterpillar. I find them wandering on their own, but also...

... in their webs, still living communally as they do when they are small.

 3) White marked tussock moth caterpillar. I have been finding a lot of these all summer. Right now I am finding big ones...

 

 ... I am guessing this one is going to pupate soon...

 ... and also small ones. How small?

 

Other Bugs:

 

 Assassin bug with prey

 I think this is a tachinid fly.

 Sweat bee. Before I found the dragonfly I was going to make this the Backyard Bug of the Day just because I thought on such a sweltering day an insect with sweat in its name was apropos.

 Who is that hiding there?

 Katydid. Female.

 Looper caterpillar on purple cone flower petal

Meanwhile, in the dining room:

 The latest caterpillar to prepare for pupation has chosen a really bad spot. This is inside the rack that holds the water tubes the plant cuttings are in. I don't know if it will have enough room to straighten out before shedding its skin and becoming a chrysalis, and I know it won't have enough room to emerge as a butterfly and straighten out its wings. I can't do anything about the first problem, but once it is a chrysalis I can carefully move it to a better location.

The hatchling is now big enough to be in the enclosure on the plant cuttings, instead of in a container with a single leaf, because the only other caterpillar left is not much bigger than it is.

Oh, and I forgot to mention this yesterday–the half-eaten, dried up frog corpse is gone from the rock garden path. Something must have decided to eat it.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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Ant mimic spider.

Funnel web spider. From where it was hiding in its den it could, if it had the right kind of vision (which it doesn't) have seen that huge dragonfly on the other trunk of the two-trunk tree where the spiders web is hung. It would have been so tantalizing, I am sure.

The cicada above was not alone. Here you can see what else was lurking nearby–a daddy-long-legs/harvestman.