Windchilled

I did NOT want to do a bug walk today. Not only was the temperature in the mid-30s, but the wind was howling fiercely, which meant it felt much colder than it was. There was NO CHANCE, I figured, that there were any bugs around. But that was why I had to do a bug walk, to prove that there was nothing there. Except... I was out very early today, as the sun was rising, and when I got home I decided to go look at a tree in the backyard where there was a tree cricket yesterday. I wanted to see if it was there still, or if it had taken cover during the cold night. Well, it was there, still clinging to the tree trunk. I didn't feel like going in to get my camera at that time, so I decided I was going to have to do a bug walk later. The cricket wasn't going to go anywhere in such cold temperatures, I figured (and it is important to point out that the temperature only rose two degrees between 7:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m.).

When I got out there with my camera in the afternoon, this is what I found:

 The cricket was still there, but it wasn't so much resting on the tree as dangling from it. I don't know if it was still alive, and just too cold to function, or if it had died from the cold. It was almost as if the wind had blown it partway off the trunk, and it wasn't capable to moving to get a better grip. I contemplated bringing it inside, to see what would happen when it warmed up, but then what? I can't feed it all winter, and this is just life as an insect. For all I know it reached the end of its lifespan.

I didn't do a complete bug walk, covering the whole backyard, because frankly, it was miserable out there. I am not acclimated to temperatures in the 30s yet, and the windchill was just plain painful. Surprisingly, the cricket was not the only insect I found:

 Stinkbug on the front porch

 Fly on the side of the house.

 Winter firefly. This one has been in the same nook in the bark of this tree for weeks, on and off.

March fly. Of course, all of this just proves me wrong in what I said the other day, about the threshold for finding insects being the low 40s. Except I did say it is not an exact number. And I think these were just bugs that were already out there that got caught out by the cold. Nothing was emerging into this chill, I am pretty sure.