A Week in the Life of a Backyard

 I haven't had a chance to blog lately, so I am a bit behind, but I haven't done a full bug walk in a week, so... I guess this is a catch-up post.

I don't really remember what was up, really... It's been hot, and my asthma has kept me indoors a lot, and the few times I have been able to get out to walk have mostly been night hikes. I always end up wishing I had my camera, but I keep not bringing it, because... night. Or rain. Or... well, mostly I have just been looking for bugs right around the back porch area. But I did do a full bug walk a week ago, so let's start there...

 Backyard Bug of the Day for July 2, 2024:

Ground beetle

Other Bugs:

Draonfly. I've seen a lot of this species lately.

The great spangled fritillary came back for more milkweed nectar.

I saw one in the woods, too.

Caterpillar dangling from a thread.
 

How about some bug-spotting practice? 

Can you spot the leaf hopper? 

 

 How about the tortoise beetle?

 Tortoise beetle

How about a green stinkbug?

Green stinkbug 

Yeah, okay, those were all kind of easy...

Still lots of grasshoppers and katydids in the meadow:

The katydid is the smaller one. Both are nymphs. In fact, all of the grasshoppers and katydids I have seen so far this year have been nymphs, I think.

 

Katydid nymph
 

Thorn mimic plant hopper nymph 

Some other kind of hopper nymph.

Lady beetle

There was a dramatic incident during my walk. A bug flew into my eye, and I naturally reacted by closing my eye, and then removing the bug. Usually this ends with the bug really squished and dead (and with me in pain), but today the bug survived this encounter. I pulled it off my face, and set it on a rock in front of me. And then...

I didn't notice I set it down right next to an ant...

But the ant noticed, and seized the opportunity... and the fly!

The ant grabbed on and started dragging the fly away...

The fly fought back at times–note the blur of the beating wings...

But the ant managed to subdue it. In the end, I think the ant won.

The fly had amazing eyes! I guess it just shouldn't have flown into mine.

I saw this caterpillar scurrying along... I didn't know caterpillars could scurry so fast.

Another dreaded spotted lanternfly nymph. One of their favorite things to destroy is grapevines, which is part of why they are such a problem, they are destroying vineyards. This one is on a wild grape vine.

Leaf-footed bug nymph:

An exciting update from the back porch!

I turns out that at least two more of the eggs hatched! One of the baby wrens has a several-day head start on its siblings, but there was a lag between the laying of the eggs, too.

Okay, so that was July 2 taken care of... 

On July 4th I went for a walk, but didn't take my camera. However, I did go inside and get my camera when I saw something in the rock garden worth photographing:

Here's a two-fer, the butterfly that I brought out my camera for, and a wasp.

I was impressed that the butterfly just sat there while I went in for the camera, and then posed so nicely for me. Some kind of hairstreak, I am not looking it up. I really need to get a butterfly book...

Dragonfly, also in the rock garden.

The biggest baby bird kind of squashes its siblings out of the way, and is very demanding:

Then, the next day...

I didn't post a Backyard Bug of the Day on July 5th, but this is it:

Grape leaf skeletonizer moth. It is the caterpillar of this species that skeletonizes grape leaves; the adult (the moth) eats nectar like almost all moths. The milkweed flowers are very popular with many species of insects (hard to see here, but there were ants all over the blossoms).

A couple of hopper nymphs:

We had terrible weather on Saturday, July 6th, but in a lull I went outside an spotted the Backyard Bugs of the Day:

Huddled together on the underside of a milkweed leaf, milkweed tussock moth caterpillars. A few days old, I would guess. Monarch butterflies lay single eggs on milkweed, but the tussock moth obviously lays a mass of them. I have never seen an egg mass, but here's a mass of caterpillars.

Then I noticed a leaf on the back porch tree that had been folded and covered with silk, so I looked more closely:

One of the new baby birds

On July 7th I went for a night hike, but I took a couple of photos of the milkweed in the afternoon:

The reason I went to get my camera is because I walked by this plant and saw this grape leaf skeletonizer moth, a great spangled fritillary butterfly and two bumblebees on this same flower clump, but the moth is the only one that stuck around by the time I got back outside with the camera.

One bumblebee came back, though.

Not sure what this is...

On to... July 8th:

The milkweed tussock moth caterpillars developed quite a bit over the course of two days:

Look how much they have devoured the leaf.

 Aaaaand... on the back porch... the opening of the wrens' nest has been widened, but I don't know if the parents did that, or if the chicks did it because they are crowded in there. However, it makes it easier for me to see them:

The bigger chick dominates the scene, but note the little one on the lower right. This is the last time I saw the big chick; the next day it fledged.

And finally, July 9th!

I found another milkweed leaf with little milkweed tussock moth caterpillars:

These were even smaller.

Meanwhile, on the other plant, the older milkweed tussock moth caterpillars have dispersed. There were only a few left on the plant.

 

Meanwhile, on the back porch...

 

Ailanthus webworm moth on the underside of a milkweed leaf

Caddisfly, also on milkweed.

It's a little roomier in the wrens' nest without the biggest chick...

... but not a lot.
 

And that's a round-up of what I saw in my backyard for the last week! (Well, 8 days).

But also... Arachnid Appreciation:

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Gorgeous purple spider

But uncooperative.

I found some spiderlings!

From July 6th:

Spider on the living room window screen. The blue in the background is the hydrangeas in the rock garden.

This trashline spider built its web on the back porch, but it foolishly attached it to the door, so it got broken when I opened the door. Sorry, spider, I didn't realize you had done that, and I need the door to go in and out of the house!

New Bugs

 I got my macro lens in September of 2011 (a gift from my husband), but I didn't start using it to look for bugs until the spring of 2012. Knowing next to nothing about bugs at the time, I assumed, having received the lens on the last day of September, that "bug season" was over, and there wouldn't be anything to photograph with it. So I didn't even try. I mean, I probably saw plenty of bugs after I got it, although I wasn't spending near as much time outside at that phase of my life. I just thought that with colder weather coming, there wouldn't be bugs around, and I didn't really start trying to take pictures of them until the following spring. And, to be clear, even though I wasn't all that into bugs yet at that point, the main reason that my husband gave me a macro lens was so that I could take pictures of bugs. You see, I had tried using my regular lens to take pictures of bugs many times, and it was just not that satisfying or successful. So the bug photography started in earnest in 2012. At that point my knowledge of bugs exploded, but most of the explosion at the start was just the massive revelation of how many kinds of bugs there were in my backyard. There were a lot, and I mean A LOT of things I had never seen before, in over 10 years of hanging out in their habitat. That first year it was easy to choose a Backyard Bug of the Day every day that I had not photographed before. That meant I found hundreds of distinct species of bugs. (Or rather, insects. I am not sure if that summer was when I learned that not all insects are bugs, if you use the classification of Hemipterans as "true bugs"). The following year I wasn't exactly finding new species every day, but I found them quite often. Over the ensuing years the number of new bugs I have found has dwindled. I am sure there are still a huge number of bugs in my backyard I have never seen before, but still, though I have never counted them up, the total of species I have found would probably blow my 2012 mind. The thing that is currently blowing my 2024 mind is that 12 years later I am still finding new species.

And today I found two.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #1:

Rose hooktip moth caterpillar. My caterpillar book (Caterpillars of Eastern North America by David L Wagner) only shows four species from this family–one of the thinnest sections in the book. It says there are only eight eastern species. Fortunately this is one of the ones in the book.

That bump on its head was very helpful in identifying it. Note the silk thread it is using to hold onto the leaf.

Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #2:

Two marked treehopper. Obviously another thorn mimic. I'm not 100% sure that I have not seen this species before, but at least 95%. [Edit: I was wrong. I have seen one of these before].

This one is not a new species, but it was so cooperative that I have to make it Backyard Co-Bug of the Day #3:

Great spangled fritillary! Feeding on milkweed.

Great spangled fritillaries are probably the most cooperative species of butterfly. It was incredibly windy today, and I still managed a bunch of good shots of this butterfly, that's how cooperative it was. Note the curled proboscis. And the photo-bombing long-legged fly.

It let me take pictures of both sides of its wings!

None of the pictures show it, but today I realized that those spots are not white, they are silver.

Proboscis in action.

And yet, not the only cooperative butterfly I saw today. We went to the grocery store, and as we were backing out of the driveway I saw a butterfly on sitting on a plant. I sarcastically said that maybe it would still be there when we got home. And it was. But at that time I was on a phone call with my niece, and didn't want to interrupt our conversation to take a picture of the butterfly. But when we were done talking some time later I went outside with my camera, and the butterfly was still there. I fully expected it to fly away as soon as I tried to take its picture, but it stayed completely still:

Small wood satyr butterfly

Other Bugs:

 Unfortunately, I am finding more spotted lanternfly nymphs:

This is just an exuvia, the skin shed when it moults to the next instar. So now I need to be looking for red, black and white bugs.

Still first instar.

Stinkbug nymph.

Crane flies 

Six-spotted tiger beetle:

Buffalo tree hopper

I don't think I have ever seen as many dragonflies as I have this year. It's great after seeing almost none last year.

 

 

 

I think still only one of the birds on the back porch has hatched, and I think at this point the others are not going to, but the parents are still sitting on the nest a lot. The one baby has grown quite a bit in the last few days:

Its eye is open a bit.

Frog:

Frogs are scarce lately, and the ones I have been finding are smaller. There's not much water left in the stream; at this point the rain just keeps it from completely drying out, instead of filling it up.

Hmm... I didn't see any spiders today...