Random

Random thoughts about bugs in my backyard...
There are some HUGE crickets (well, huge for crickets) living in my rock garden, but I can never get close enough to them to get a picture; they are bashful and scurry under the plants when I get within ten feet of them. I see them basking on the rocks, and think I will finally get my shot, and away they go.

I sort of did two bug walks today, because when I took my camera out with me when I got the mail I ended up walking around for quite a while finding and photographing bugs. Probably around half of the 400 pictures I took today were from that pre-walk.

The last couple of weeks in my backyard have made it clear: you need to plant late-blooming flowers in your yard for pollinators to have food in the autumn. Asters, mums, morning glories... I don't imagine many people want to plant goldenrod, but there are plenty of suburban yard-friendly flowers. Feed the bees. And the wasps, flower flies, butterflies...

Speaking of butterflies, I have still not seen any hairstreaks this fall.

It was still overcast today, but it was warmer (61ºF was the highest I saw), and not raining, and there were a lot of bugs out today. There were a lot more crickets singing, too.

I might take the next two days off. We'll see...

I found what I think is another new bug for me and my backyard today. This has been my 8th year of observing the bugs in my backyard, and it amazes me–though it probably shouldn't–that I can still find new species. And here is that new species, as Backyard Bug of the Day:

 I am assuming this is a plant bug of some kind. It is clearly a Hemiptera.

 Bonus, I actually saw three of them!

Because I took so many pictures today, and this is going to take forever, I am going to post all of the rest of them in the order I took them (or the order in which they load properly), and so the rest of the blog will be kind of disorganized. But you're just here to see the cool bugs, so does it matter if I arrange them nicely by species, order, host plant, or any other characteristic? No? So, here we go with the Other Bugs:

I haven't seen any banded tussock moth caterpillars in a few days. I figured that they had mostly begun to pupate, and maybe just didn't like the cold and rain. I saw this one today, and it was acting kind of weird, as you can see from the distorted position of its body.

When I looked at the pictures on my computer I saw some strangeness, which could be parasite larvae. Also, it's proleg looks weird, distorted, and swollen.

Later I saw it climbing up the side of the house. I don't know what to make of it.

Green stinkbug

There were many Hymenoptera around today, primarily bumblebees and potters wasps:

Flies like to pollinate, too.

Leaf hopper

Woolly bear

Robber fly

A good way to find predatory arthropods is by checking out why insects are dangling from plants in awkward ways. This flower fly has fallen prey to an ambush bug, which blends in rather nicely with the asters.

I accidentally bumped the plant and caused the ambush bug to drop its prey, which I feel bad about.

Here it is later, waiting for another insect to come and try to pollinate that flower.

Crane fly

Milkweed bug nymphs

Gnat

There are three species of bees/wasps in this shot.

During my pre-walk today I passed by this section of the backyard and stopped to look at the remnants of the purple coneflowers among all this chaos of green. I thought that there could be a multitude of bugs right in front of me, and I just didn't see them. Then later when I went out for me regular bug walk...

I realized that there WAS a bug in there. Now, I don't know for sure that it was there the first time I went by, it was a while before I went back out after the first one. Can you see it here? Can you see it in the picture above?

Katydid. Female. It does a very good job of looking like a leaf.

In case you didn't find the katydid in the first picture, and really want to know where it is...

I found another species of katydid today. Also female.

The grasshoppers were back today. I haven't seen them since the temperature dropped a few days ago.

Caterpillars are falling prey to a lot of parasitic insects lately:

I can't tell if these are eggs, larvae, or pupae. The are right next to the dead caterpillar, but parasites and parasitoids have a variety of methods of killing their hosts. My guess is these are either larvae, and they hatched inside the caterpillar and came out, or they are pupae, and they hatched and grew inside the caterpillar, and then came out to pupate.

Assassin bug

Brown hooded owlet moth caterpillar.

 Bee

Thread-waisted wasp

Potters wasp

 While feeding on the flowers, this wasp suddenly appeared to take a liking to my pants, and zoomed right at me, landing on my thigh. I didn't know why it had done that, so I brushed it off, and it landed here on this leaf.

 Thread-waisted wasps

 Plant hopper

 Fly

There was a lot going on in the rock garden today, and mostly it involved wasps.

 It's hard to tell, but I think these are two different species of wasps.

 They were not cooperative.

 Grasshoppers

Some kind of geometer moth

I was wrong about the intentions of the infested woolly bear yesterday. It was back in its usual spot today, and it looks like it has fewer larvae, and more pupae on its back.

Arachnid Appreciation:
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The rock garden orb weaver hasn't been around for a few days, so I figured it had moved on, but it was back today:

 

The marbled orb weaver has been holed up in its bower for days, but last night it appears to have built a new web, and several insects became trapped and were wrapped up as food for the spider. When I took this picture the spider was in its bower feeding on something. When I came by later, one of these insects was gone from the web...

... and looking into the bower I could see that the spider was feeding on it.