Adjusting Expectations

 My very cynical philosophy of life is low expectations are the key to happiness. For instance, two days ago I went out to do a bug walk thinking I would find some snow fleas at the base of a tree, and found a forest teeming with insects. I had low expectations, they were wildly exceeded, and I was happy. Today I did a bug walk thinking that warmer temperatures might mean I would find more, and found almost nothing, so I was disappointed. I quickly lowered my expectations, and then I enjoyed a very pleasant walk through the snowy woods. Then I walked down into the valley and found out that that was where the bugs were today, and was pleasantly surprised again, and that made me happy. 

A couple of things had raised my expectations for finding insects in the woods today. The forecast was right on one aspect–the temperature reached 41ºF–and wrong on another–it didn't rain all day, as predicted, and the sun came out in the afternoon–and this seemed propitious for finding bugs. But also, I looked out the window and saw Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

Winter crane fly on the window. I saw quite a few flying in the woods this afternoon, most of which swooped in front of me as if to let me know they were there, but then flying on and not landing where I could take pictures. I finally found one sitting on the snow:

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

I think this is a winter stonefly, and I know that I have already had winter stoneflies as BBotD this season, but I am featuring this one anyway because I think it is a recently emerged adult. It looks like it has just molted from its nymphal stage and has not darkened yet. I am not sure, because the wings are not curled around the body the way stonefly wings do, but maybe that also takes a while to happen after it molts into adulthood? I did a search for information online, which was not terribly fruitful (unless you want to know how to tie fishing flies), but I did find out that as nymphs they are aquatic (and thinking back, I think that a strange insect I saw in the stream last spring was probably a stonefly nymph), they emerge as adults in the middle of winter, they do so in the pocket of air between the surface of the water and the ice (there is still some ice on the stream, and I found this a few feet away from it), and, as I suspected, there are multiple species of winter stoneflies. So, as an interesting specimen that may have just changed from a nymph to an adult, I decided this was worthy of being BBotD. Unlike two days ago, I hardly saw any stoneflies today, either walking around on the snow or on trees (not even that one tree where I have seen so many of them).

I only saw a couple more stoneflies today.
 

Other Bugs:

Before I got down into the valley, most of the snow fleas I saw were on the trunks of trees, which is where I have usually seen them in the past. This one was near the house, just barely into the woods.

There are a few trees that last winter I could often find snow fleas on, and I have been looking out for them for a while, but today was the first day this winter I found them. 

My first sign of the abundance of snow fleas in the valley was in the same spot I first saw them they day after the storm. This is the densest concentration I have seen this week–even though there were a lot of them in the valley, nowhere else outside of this few square inches had so many.

I don't know what's going on here, but that one underneath looks like a different species of springtail.

I saw several caddisfly larvae today in the stream. This one was even moving. You can just barely see its head sticking out. Interestingly, one thing I read online while I was looking for information on stonefly nymphs seemed to imply that scientists don't know a lot about how cold the water can get before aquatic insects will become inactive, which is something I have been wondering about for a while. I guess this means I am not going to find out. And on that same subject, I didn't see any water beetles this evening during my walk, but I did see one yesterday evening.

 

Obviously, as I walked today I kept an eye out for snow scorpionflies, and for quite a while was disappointed not to see any, but I did finally find one:

Snow makes it easier to see evidence of other animals besides insects walking around in the woods. We've seen a lot of footprints of animals who like to use our walking trails:

It's not easy to tell what animals are from footprints in the snow (except for deer). This could be the bobcat.

And I spotted this today:

It is difficult to explain this if you haven't seen this area, but basically this is a hole in an enormous pile of rocks. We have been saying since we discovered it that the holes in this pile of rocks are probably great den spots for animals. Today I noticed that there are muddy footprints on the snow coming from the hole. I could not identify the footprints at all, but something came out of there in the last couple of days. Maybe it was a late groundhog. If so, it went far enough from the hole that it must not have seen its shadow. Early spring! Perhaps this is too much conjecture, particularly based on a baseless superstition disguised as folklore.

We downloaded the pictures from our trail cam a couple of days ago, and had some nice shots. Obviously, to post pictures from the trail cam I have to break the rule of my blog that the pictures have to be from the day of the post–we don't check it every day. So, here's a couple of the animals that have been using our paths:

Coyote. This is still the only way we have ever seen a coyote on our property. We have heard them, and seen evidence of them, but our only actual views have been from the trail cam.

I think these are two different bobcats:

This one looks smaller to me. If it is two different ones, it would be a male and a female, because they have territories. The male would be the bigger one, if I am remembering correctly from the lecture I went to.

And here's an animal I didn't even know we had in Connecticut until I saw one on our trail cam:

Red squirrel. It's strange to me that this is on my trail cam, which at the moment is not very far from the house, in a spot that is part of our new land, but only a few steps away from where I have been walking on my bug walks for the last 8 years or so, and yet I have never seen a red squirrel in my backyard.

I only saw one species of spider today, and one other arachnid. Arachnid Appreciation:

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I figure that the abundance of snow fleas and other insects to eat is why there are spiders around, because as far as I am concerned, the law of nature is if there is something to eat, there will be something to eat it. I only saw this one on my bug walk, but I did another walk in the early evening and saw two more. Oh, and yesterday I started my walk around dusk, so it got dark while I was out there, and I found another species of spider. I think that is four this week, all out in the snow?

I noticed these remains of what I think was a gypsy moth egg mass from years past, and wondered what that dark brown object was; it was a couple of feet above my head on a tree trunk, so I could not see it up close. I took a picture in order to get a better look at it, and realized that it is an old chrysalis-much too small to be a gypsy moth, so some other species of caterpillar must have randomly decided to pupate on the old eggs. There was something else that I couldn't see until I looked at the picture:

A mite crawling on the chrysalis