Tiny Thrill

It has been cold all week, too cold to find bugs, but today the temperature was way up, so I did a bug walk. I had been hoping for abundance, and didn't find it, but what I found instead makes up for it. I won't say it was unexpected, because... well, it wasn't so unexpected, more like unlikely. Maybe that makes no sense. But hey, this doesn't make a lot of sense for February:

 It's not so outrageous though, as I have been learning, to see a looper caterpillar out and about in February. It seems like plenty of insects wake up when the weather warms up a little, and then find somewhere else to go back into hiding when it gets cold again. I am no longer shocked when I find caterpillars in the winter. I am only thrilled to see them. That white thing it's standing on is not snow or ice, by the way. It's a PVC pipe that is sticking out of our picnic table.

 Itty, bitty, baby springtail on tiny, icy puddle. None of the other puddles in the backyard today had any springtails on them (that I could see).

 Midge. There were a few things I spotted flying around in my backyard today, and though I couldn't see what most of them were, they were likely either midges or winter crane flies.

 Stone fly. This is the winter of the stone fly in my backyard.

 With the low angle of the sun this time of year it is easy to see the shimmer of hundreds of spider threads around the backyard. I found one rock that was covered with a series of threads (and I wish it had been possible to get a picture of it, but it's the kind of thing that is very hard to capture in a photograph. Nearly impossible, really, and I was unable to do it). These are not prey-catching webs, but the silk lines that spiders trail behind them as they move from place to place. Some of them are bridges between things, but sometimes they just run along the branches, or in that one case, rock that they spiders walk on. They do this in case they need to make a quick escape; it's an anchor thread for if they have to suddenly jump off of whatever they are walking on. With all those threads, though, I only managed to find one spider for Arachnid Appreciation:
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

 

 That metal spring is the "antenna" of a metal beetle garden decoration in the rock garden.