This was my second cross country road trip, and there was a major change in my life in between the trip I took seven years ago and the one I took this summer: I got interested in bugs. That first trip happened in the summer of 2011, and in the fall of 2011 I was given my macro lens as a birthday gift from my husband. I (erroneously) figured it was too late in the year to find and photograph bugs with my new gear that year, but the following spring is when I started Backyard Bug of the Day on facebook. It was a couple of years before I started this blog, but in all of that time I was finding amazing bugs and learning about them. And just noticing them more, and becoming more interested in them. So last time on the road trip, there were two notable bug incidents, which I didn't know anything about; a night in Minnesota where there were huge swarms of bugs that surrounded our car on a country road, and a bugnado that I saw in Nebraska (which looks alarmingly like a tornado, but is actually made of swarming bugs). This time I noticed bugs all over the place. We went to Missouri, and saw more butterflies than I think I have ever seen before aside from at butterfly enclosures, including some species I have never seen before. We saw HUGE numbers of dragonflies swooping as we drove through Colorado (and also at the Grand Canyon, and a few other places). We saw a gorgeous, little species of grasshopper in Colorado that we do not have here in Connecticut. I saw another species of grasshopper on a beach in California, and I only saw it because it moved; it blended in perfectly with the sand. In fact, I saw a lot of grasshoppers, period. I saw an ENORMOUS beetle in Colorado, that unfortunately was frightened into a hole before I got a good look at it. Oh, I promised myself that I would remember all the interesting bugs that I saw, but right now I am drawing a blank. Suffice to say that, there were a lot of bugs out there (and, sadly, a lot of bugs smashed on the front of our car. It's a pretty aerodynamic car, and usually bugs just get swept right over it, but for a massive number of bugs in the last couple of weeks that was not the case), and it was an interesting detail to my trip that I would not have noticed in the past.
I got home just before dark tonight, and it was raining, so I couldn't do a bug walk (though I did check out my backyard. It's squishy–apparently there was about 6 inches of rain while I was gone), and it looks like a jungle, with the grass wildly overgrown. I could see that the purple coneflowers are in bloom now, but other than that, I didn't see much. I did turn on the porch light to try to attract some bugs, so...
Backyard Bug of the Day:
There were other things, but they were small and uncooperative, so I didn't get pictures of them.
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