A Little Halloween Butterfly

There are some new butterflies in town! This spring I have been seeing a lot of these cute little orange and black critters.

They've flown around the flowers and around me. One even flew between my face and the book I was reading. So they're quite the "social butterflies". 😉

So obviously I've had ample opportunity to photograph them. I swear it feels like these insects are posing sometimes.

I had to find out exactly what I was photographing. After a little googling, I learned that this is the "Red Admiral Butterfly". That's not what I would have named them, but it is a cool name.

I learned that they like nettle and overripe fruit. The ones I saw seemed happy enough with regular old dandelions. The butterflies' Wikipedia pages states:

"It is known as an unusually people-friendly butterfly, often landing on and using humans as perches."

So how about that? Here I thought I had just run into some overly social ones. Maybe one of these days, a Red Admiral Butterfly will perch on my shoulder. 🦋

P.S. ~ What you've mostly been seeing here is the inside of their wings. The outside of their wings actually could pass for a dried leaf or dry dirt. Incognito!

Sinister looking, yet harmless... to us

Hi everyone! I hope your summer has been going well so far. June was very busy and very hot month for me. I think I'll be blogging more this month. It feels good to be back!

As it happened, some blog material flew into my life a few minutes ago. I was outside taking photos of flowers when I saw a small insect fly near me. At first, I couldn't even see its wings. It just looked like a bug body hovering in the air. This insect was nice enough to land for a photo shoot. I joke that the bugs around here know they'll be famous on the internet if they'll pose for a photo.

Well, what a surprise I had when I enlarged my photos and saw what this insect really looked like! You can see it's pretty small, in relation to that rose thorn. I actually think this is a scary looking bug. I wondered if it was safe to be near. After posing for a few pics with its hind end straight back, it curled its "tail" (or whatever we should be calling it).

This time I think the bug took on an almost scorpion-like appearance.

Well, of course I headed to google to find out what I saw. I feel pretty certain that I found an answer. I believe this is a Ichneumon Wasp.  I'm still not sure if it was any danger to me. It seemed nonaggressive. But I wouldn't feel at all safe around one of these if I were a caterpillar. These wasps are the kind of bugs that insert their eggs inside a host (in this case a caterpillar) so when the babies hatch, a meal is right there. If you get my drift... It's pretty nasty - like a horror story for the bug world.

OK, I just read that these wasps are not at all dangerous to humans. They aren't interested in our blood and that stinger isn't meant for hurting us. I think it's purely for inserting eggs into whatever unlucky insect will be playing host. It's always good to know you don't have to be afraid of a bug, even if it looks menacing.

So have any of you seen one of these wasps before? I have a feeling they go undetected most of the time. They're small and fast moving! 

A new creepy-crawly in the garden

Have you seen this bug before? I saw one of these for the first time yesterday.

Not knowing what it was, I photographed it cautiously. The bug was cautious with me too. He waved his little antennae and sort of pranced around. Eventually, I just sat the camera down in front of him and let him walk toward me. That usually works well for me with photographing animals too. I don't know if they see the lens as one big black eye looking at them or what. But the camera lens appears to be less threatening to them than a human getting near (as if one big black eye sounds so safe).

Check out the striped legs! It's a little hard to see, but this bug also has red eyes. And a spiny looking backside. I don't know if it's fuzzy or spiky, and I'm pretty sure I'm never going to know.

The bug looks a little like a spider in the pic above. When I searched for photos of similar bugs, I found some like this labeled "spider". I guess people saw the antennae as legs.

Look at the curved body. This curve gave me a clue to what the bug might be. I noticed that the "Assassin Bugs" pictured online had the same curved body. But none of those were dark in color. After more searching, I found bugs like mine labeled as "Assassin Bug Nymphs". So this is like a teenage Assassin Bug.

At first I was fine with that, because what I knew of Assassin Bugs was that they ate a lot of garden pests. They're a lot like spiders in insect form. They hide and wait and then leap out for the kill. Gross Alert: Their curved bodies appear to be of good use in carrying the corpses of their victims. I saw pics online of Assassin Bugs wearing what looked like capes made of ant bodies. If you're ready to say "Eww!" you can look that up. Or I can help you be grossed out:

Assassin Bug carrying ant bodies

Hmm... and according to that web site, the Assassin Bug will suck the bodies of its prey dry, like a vampire!

Now, while it's great that this bug will grow up to be a garden helper by cleaning out the pests, I also read that it could be dangerous to humans. I'm not sure how seriously to take this but I read that Assassin Bugs will leave you in a lot of pain if they bite you. Also, I read that they're called "Kissing Bugs" because they bite people near their lips at night! (Eww again)

Their bites can carry something called Chagas Disease, which is a parasitic infection. Then I read that Chagas Disease can attack the organs and be fatal! So... I'm not sure how cute this bug is looking to me anymore. I'll definitely step carefully around them.

I'd be interested in anything you guys have to add! Do you think I've identified this bug correctly? Do you think Assassin Bugs are actually that much of a threat to humans? It's good to know what different bugs do and if they're a threat. I feel like every day, there's a new one to learn about!

*UPDATE* This is not an Assassin Bug nymph. (Thankfully!) Stephen suggested that I contact the UW Madison Department of Entomology. I sent them some pics of this bug and was told that it is a leaf footed bug, part of the Coreidae family. You can see where the "leaf footed" part comes from. I was also told that my bug might grow into one of these or something closely related: Species Acanthocephala terminalis

And guess what? It turns out Kissing Bugs aren't even in my state. So there's something I don't need to worry about anymore!

The Best of August and into September

Hope you all had a nice August! I don't think I checked in to blogger all last month, I've been so busy. So I thought it would be fun to do one of those "best of" the month posts with some photos from August and the first few days of September to show a little of what I've been up to. I'll stick with the generally spooky stuff.

So, the first thing I want to share is a series of photos from our local park. There's a nighttime concert series there in the summer and I brought my camera along to it.

 

That bridge pic is one of the spookier ones I think I took. You can't help thinking something is waiting down there. It's even a little spooky in the daylight because there's so much space under the bridge and plants growing under it. It's a bog type area.

These photos were taken into the woods that surround the park. I was randomly snapping pics while walking, so I wasn't even sure what I got. The camera had better eyesight than I did since I was using the flash. I half expected some animal to be looking back at me when I took a closer look, but I don't see any.

 At the bottom there, a bug?

I can't help thinking there's an animal in these woods, I just can't see it.

A little pond area that looks like a black hole

This is a park's waterfall in the dark. Don't those rocks on the walls behind it look like skulls? I never saw it that way in the daylight.

I also got a bat shot at the park! I know it's blurry, but it's hard for me to capture a bat. So this still feels like a success. They were dipping around so fast that probably the blurriness was caused by me trying to follow it.

Out of the park now... These next photos also felt like a success to me. I often hear crows but rarely see them when I have a camera handy. These crows nicely stayed put for me.

The garden spider was back again this year.

I was happy to get a pic of its web. Like bats and crows, spider webs are hard to catch at just the right time. The little droplets of water were a nice touch too.

Another little garden find was...

... an Ambush Bug! I learned that in the process of writing this blog post. This bug is much smaller than pictured, which is maybe why I never noticed one before.

So, what is an Ambush Bug you ask? Well, they earned their name by sitting and waiting for prey to come by and then ambushing it. I'm guessing they're usually better camouflaged than this one who is on a sunflower. Not that it's holding him back; he's snacking on an ant in this pic.

Also, it turns out that "Ambush Bug" is a comic book character I'd never heard of.

I took some more night shots during August. Those of you who follow me on Twitter might have seen these.

It's pretty dark around here, even with the street lights.

I was calling this "the evil cat eye moon". There's a even a "pupil" for the eye caused by a cloud that was passing by.

Besides walking around in the dark and observing creepy crawlies, the main thing that's been keeping me busy recently is genealogy research. I don't think obsession is too strong a word. I've been having a lot of success with it lately. It helps that our library lets us use Ancestry.com for free now! If anyone wants to talk genealogy, let me know in the comments.