Sparkling Weather

 We've had a bit more snow since my last post.

Today was sunny, though, and the sunlight sparkled like rainbow glitter on the snow. The temperature that crept above freezing lured me out with my camera; since Sunday's snow it's been below freezing day and night, but I did see a few insects on my snowshoe hikes the last couple of days, so I figured a sunny, warmer day would be a good time to go look for bugs. In fact, when we were out on Sunday during the storm, I saw a winter stonefly crawling around atop the snow. Here's something I am wondering about: how is it that I have lived in places that have snowy winters for so long, going for walks in the snow for many winters, and it is not until this year that I noticed how many insects crawl around on the snow? I didn't do a lot of bug walks in snowy weather in the last few years, but I was certainly out in the snow, and primed to see insects everywhere. I did see them, but I never saw so many. Was I just walking in the wrong place? I spent most of my life thinking that bugs all die in the winter, how in the world did I go for snow hikes for so many years without noticing how untrue that is? Anyway, I was expecting today to be like the day last week, after that storm, when there were insects everywhere. That turned out not to be the case, and for about half of my walk I was annoyed that I had even brought my camera with me. 

But it improved. Backyard Bug of the Day:

Midges. Male...

... and female. I saw several of each, mostly in the valley, which once again was where I found the majority of the bugs on my walk today. Sadly for the midges, I did not see any of the males and females in proximity to each other. I saw one on my snowshoe hike a couple of days ago when the temperature was below freezing, so I was not surprised to find several of them today (which, by the way, was only just above freezing).

Other Bugs:

 

I found a lot of stoneflies, and had to watch where I stepped all along our snowshoe tracks from the last couple of days to keep from stepping on them.

 I found a couple of different species, I think, if I am right that the fact that they are different sizes means they are different species. I know it's hard to tell their sizes from the pictures, but this one...

... and this one were both taken at maximum close-up with the macro lens, so that should give an indication of the difference.

I thought this one was a different species at first glance, because it was bright red, but when I looked closer I could see that it was covered with something. At the time I thought it was some kind of fungus, but looking at the picture on the computer...

... I think it's covered with a whole lot of mites.

This was my favorite stonefly of the day, because it was on a tree trunk at about my eye level, which meant I did not have to bend down or crouch to get a picture of it, unlike all the bugs in the snow.

Also to be found on tree trunks, though only two of them, the only snow fleas I saw today. There were only a handful on each of the two trees. After that huge abundance of them last week after the snow, this week they were scarce.

I found one snow scorpionfly today. Female.

And today's most unexpected find:

A fly, crawling around on the snow. As far as I know, this is not a "winter" fly. But insects do whatever they want, I've noticed.

 I found a few spiders for Arachnid Appreciation:

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This poor jumping spider was dead, curled up on its back on top of the snow. I thought maybe it was just too cold, because I have never seen a jumping spider in the winter, so I moved it to a sunny spot in the hopes that it would warm up and be on its way, but when I went snowshoeing later it was still there, in the exact same curled-up position.

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

Walking in a Winter Wonderland of Unexpected Arthropods

 We had a blizzard Monday. This is what the woods look like these days:

This photo was taken with my cellphone, but I did bring my real camera into the woods today. It had the macro lens on it, though, so it wasn't ideal for taking a landscape photo. It's two days since the blizzard and the temperature today was close to 40ºF. I went on a bug walk in the woods for a specific reason: yesterday when we went snowshoeing in the woods I found some snow fleas, and I wanted to take pictures of them, but a cellphone is really no good for that, because snow fleas are tiny, so tiny that if you saw them, and they weren't moving, and you didn't know what snow fleas are, you would probably not even realize that they are living creatures. So, today I figured I would walk out to where I saw the snow fleas and they could be Backyard Bug of the Day. They are certainly not a new species for me, but strangely, in my regular backyard I hardly ever see them on snow. I see them on tree trunks and rocks, but only on a few occasions have I seen them on snow. And yesterday was my first sighting of them this winter, I think. So, seeing them on snow yesterday, I thought it would be nice to get those shots, and I was fairly certain that I would be able to find the snow fleas in the same spot today. The tree where I saw them yesterday is just about as far from my house as you can get in my woods, almost to the far border of the property. I arranged my day so that I would have time to walk out there during the daylight hours. I have no idea what snow fleas do at night, but daylight was definitely going to make taking photos easier. So, I set out with my camera, planning to walk all the way across the woods, and scarcely had I entered the woods when I saw snow fleas on the snow right on my path. Lots and lots of snow fleas. Probably more than I have ever seen before. They were all spread out; I didn't get to see a huge, tight mass of them, as I have sometimes seen in photos, but there were an incredible number of them. So, I didn't really have to walk far at all–I took some pictures, and told myself that I had what I had come for... but... I like walking in my woods, and I need the exercise every day, and even though I was on a time crunch today, I had given myself enough time to walk out to that far tree... so, I decided to continue on and visit the tree anyway. And it was the most amazing bug walk that I have had in... well, I haven't done a bug walk in a couple of months, but this was a better bug walk than I had in month before that. Snow all over the ground, completely overcast day, and there were bugs everywhere. First, there were the snow fleas. I probably walked just under a mile, and covered acres of woods, and for a huge proportion of the space I covered, there were snow fleas all over the ground, like someone had walked through the woods with a pepper shaker in each hand, sprinkling pepper on the snow. But it wasn't just the snow fleas. The number of species of insects–and other arthropods–that I saw today was shocking. Mind you, it's February, and there's snow all over the ground; we're not talking dozens of species. But... well, let's just get to it...

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

Snow scorpionfly. This is a new species for me; I didn't even know such a thing existed. I am proud of myself, though, for having noticed how much it looks like a scorpionfly; I thought maybe it was a scorpionfly nymp, not knowing if they have nymphs or larvae. But no, this is an adult snow scorpionfly. Recognizing the resemblance made it easy for me to find out what it was by looking up scorpionfly nymph online, and then I looked it up in my bug books, and actually found it in two of them. Huzzah! I learned so much today!

So, here's what I learned about this gorgeous, little insect: first, obviously that a snow scorpionfly exists. When I thought it was just a scorpionfly nymph, a summer species, I figured it had gotten dislodged from wherever it was sheltering for the winter, but no, it's normal for these to be out on the snow. I began to figure that out when I found more than one of them today, and not near each other. It seemed like an extraordinary coincidence that three of them would happen to have been knocked out of whatever treebark crevice they were hiding in for the winter and landed on my walking path. So, according to Kaufman's Field Guide to Insects of North America AND Insects of New England and New York, it's normal to see these on snow "In late winter or early spring." Well, it's mid-winter, but whatever. Both books also mentioned that they feed on moss, including in their larval stage, which makes me wonder if the tiny larvae I found in some moss a couple of years ago and was never able to identify were larval snow scorpionflies.

This, by the way, is a female.

This one is a female, too. And how do I know that? Well, that pointy end does look like an ovipositor, but that's not how.

I also learned about sexual dimorphism in snow scorpionflies. Female snow scorpionflies don't have wings...

... but males have tiny (not flight-capable) wings that are used in mating. So here's a male...

Note the tiny wings.

I also learned that when they want to avoid predators they curl up and try to look like a piece of dirt (according to Insects of New England and New York):

It's not super effective if your predator, or in this case, photographer, sees you do it... or, maybe it works just fine with predators. It didn't work on me.

Backyard Co-Bugs of the Day #2:

Snow fleas. Like pepper on snow. Pepper that jumps around.

Snow fleas are not fleas, they are a species of springtail. Depending on your source of information, they are not even insects; Kaufman's Field Guide to Insects of North America says, "Springtails are now considered 'non-insect hexapods,' or even placed in their own class..."

The book also says they are among the most abundant invertebrates, and today I could definitely see why.

 These are not the only species of springtails I saw today, either. I saw two more species:

One of the reasons that I continued on my walk today was because I wanted to look on a tree where I have been seeing winter stoneflies in the last month or so. Before the blizzard we had several days when the temperature was below freezing both day and night, and so I wasn't seeing stoneflies, but I thought since today was warmer I might find them. Well, I didn't have to look on that tree, because I found them all along my path, crawling around on the snow. There were nowhere near as many as the snow fleas, but I saw more stoneflies today than I think I have ever seen.

I did check on the trunk of that tree, and I found one stonefly. Not so surprising that I didn't see more; the stoneflies definitely preferred walking around on the snow today. 

At the foot of that tree the snow was covered in snow fleas, and I also found one of the other springtails and my first snow scorpionfly. A few square feet of forest, so many species of arthropods! And that's not even all of what I found today!

I mentioned that we had several days of freezing temperatures; during those days parts of the stream froze over, mostly the pools where I have been seeing water beetles and caddisfly larvae. The ice made it harder to see under the water in most spots, and I didn't do any night hikes, so I didn't get to see if they were active after dark (which is when I normally find them). I have been curious about how cold the water can get before they are no longer active. I did see a few caddisly larvae on one of my hikes on those cold days, but I did not see them move at all. Since the blizzard it has warmed up a little bit, just above freezing yesterday, and several degrees above today, so the ice on the stream is mostly gone. I saw this caddisfly larva in one of the pools. It was too far from the bank for me to get a closer shot, and I didn't see it move at all in the minute or so that I watched it. But at least I saw it.

This was another surprise today: a big sowbug on the snow.

I don't know what this is. At first I thought it was an ant, but it looks more like some kind of tiny, wingless wasp.

A cocoon

Today I saw three different species of spiders to appreciate in Arachnid Appreciation:

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Nestling

 We don't use the front door very much these days, because when we go our for our walks we go out the back door, and we don't really go much of anywhere else. But the front porch the last few months has been frequented by another creature that probably appreciates the fact that we are hardly ever there:

Possibly a carolina wren, this bird likes to spend the cold nights in and around the robins' nest on the grapevine wreath on the wall of the porch. It used to huddle under the nest, or nestle in between the wreath and the wall. The last few times I have seen it it has been sitting in the nest or on the edge of it. I forgot to go out and get the mail today, so I went out during the late evening to get it, and happened to see this little face watching me over the edge of the nest.

It snowed a little bit today, and I went for my woods walk just as it was beginning to stick. Out of habit I did look for bugs, specifically, I looked on beech tree trunks for stoneflies, and didn't see any there. Then as I was walking, I happened to see something land on a snow-covered rock. Backyard Bug of the Day:

I think it's a midge. What it was doing flying around on a snowy day like today I don't know.