The Bugs in the Backyard: In My Overgrown Backyard

Ah, home, sweet home. Today was definitely a day for wearing tick repellent pants. I didn't see any ticks, but the grass is very long in the lawn at the moment, and walking through that is a great way to end up with a tick bite. But I wasn't really thinking about ticks when I went out to do my bug walk. I was thinking about caterpillars, specifically monarch caterpillars. I inspected the milkweed growing in the middle of the lawn to see if I could find any monarch caterpillars–I had seen a monarch butterfly when I went out to run errands earlier in the day–hoping that there would be some there. I found quite a few caterpillars on the milkweed. But none of them were monarchs.
One of them is Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

Milkweed tussock moth caterpillar. From its name you can probably guess what its host plant is. It's usually pretty rare in my backyard, I'll see one or two each summer, if I see any. But today I found a lot of them, and on milkweed plants all over the backyard.

It had company on the milkweed:

I don't know if this is two caterpillars, or if the smaller thing is the shed skin of the larger one. I should have examined it more closely, but I got distracted and forgot to go back to it.

On the same patch of milkweed:

In the past I would have said that this is white marked tussock moth caterpillar, but I recently discovered in my caterpillar book that there is another species that looks like this, and from the coloring I think it is that other species. However, I am writing this upstairs, and my bug books are downstairs, and I am a lazy bug blogger, so I am just not going to look anything up today. If I know the name of something, I'll tell you, but otherwise... no. It's late, I'm tired, and this is taking too long anyway...

The backyard was very caterpillary today...

The fist white hickory tussock moth caterpillar I have seen this summer. (Hm... lot's of tussock moth caterpillars today).

I found a couple of plants with these:

Some kind of tent caterpillar?

This looper covers itself with plant debris as camouflage.

And then I found this one one... The back porch tree has resurrected itself, and grown impressively in the time I was away, and this caterpillar was on it. There's a great irony in the regrowth of that tree. Almost all of the mountain laurel shrubs that we have planted over the last 4 years have died, in spite of the efforts we made to keep them alive and thriving. And this tree, which was growing in the wrong place for it, so wrong that it broke completely, is coming back to life. Well, it's a good thing for the bugs, a great many species of insects and spiders enjoyed that tree.

I took a LOT of pictures in the backyard today. More than I took at the Grand Canyon when I was there a couple of weeks ago. So, I have quite a lot of Random Bugs:

The goldenrod is just starting to bloom and is already popular with bees...

wasps...

... butterflies, like this hairstreak (like I said, I am not going to look it up. Maybe a white M hairstreak, but I don't think so)...

... and beetles, like this tumbling flower beetle.

The rock garden is full of little grasshoppers, as it tends to be this time of year.

Baby assassin bug

Leaf hopper

I know this looks like a squashed, dead moth, but it's not. It flew around quite a bit before I managed to get this picture.

The purple coneflowers are blooming, too:

Leaf hoppper

I think this is a sawfly.

This might be slug eggs. I don't know. I am not a slug fan, so the idea grosses me out.

I know what you're thinking right now. I said the caterpillar up there was a Co-Backyard Bug of the Day, so where's the other one? It's right here, Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2: