Sam and Rosie found this nearly 2-inch caterpillar crawling across the road at Rosie’s preschool on September 22, 2012, so they brought it home for me.
While it is mostly uniform green, the white stripes running down the sides from the head all the way down the body, with an added brown streak on the head, looks a lot like the characteristic markings of an Angulose Prominent, Peridea angulosa.
On the morning of September 21, 2012, we found this pile of beetle parts about 20 feet from our front door. It was about the size of a tennis ball.
As it happens, Sandy had seen a skunk sniffing around the yard the previous evening, so we had a pretty good idea of who had left this little gift for us. Skunks are omnivorous, and the nature of their droppings depends a lot on what they had been eating. And this one had evidently found a nice cache of beetles.
On September 17, 2012, I spotted a couple of flies that had died horribly on our windows. They had been infected by a fungus that had bloated their abdomens, and then when they died the fungus sprayed spores in all directions (you can see the spores where they hit the window glass and stuck).
We were sitting at our picnic table in the yard on September 3, 2012 when this little yellow aphid landed on Sandy. Its body was about the length of this underscore ( _ ) if you are reading this in standard 12-point type [1].
Our last specimen from the August 23, 2012 orgy of sweep-netting is this slender brown bug (photographed while it was standing on my knuckle).
It’s a dead ringer for Protenor belfragei, a very common brown bug that doesn’t seem to have drawn enough attention from the general population to get called by a common name.
Little Brown Inchworm with Black Splotches
This little inchworm was caught by sweep-netting in the tall grass on August 23, 2012. It was busy trying to avoid notice by pretending to be a stick.
Sometimes, for variety, it would pretend to be a crooked stick. In this next picture, you can also see a small red mite near the bottom. The mite was barely visible to the naked eye, at about a millimeter.
Also in the August 23, 2012 sweep-net was this little bug.
It looked rather like a small shield, and the name “shield bug” was rattling around in my brain, so I used that as a search term, and – found out that the term isn’t quite as specific as I thought. It seems that there are “Shield Bugs” in the family Acanthosomatidae, and there are “Shield-Backed Bugs”, in the family Scutelleridae. As it turns out, this one looks like one of the Shield-Backed Bugs in the genus Eurygaster.
Continuing with the insects caught by sweep-netting in the tall grass on August 23, 2012, here’s another kind of katydid.
These are sometimes called “sword-bearers” because of the long, swordlike ovipositor the females have. Luckily for us, she only uses it to lay eggs in plant stems, it’s not as dangerous as it looks.
Also in the August 23, 2012 sweep-net were a number of these brown stink-bugs with sharp spines on their shoulders.
This is one of the Soldier Bugs in the genus Podisus, which are predatory stink-bugs that are particularly fond of caterpillars. An how do I know they are predatory? Because I found one predating, here – it’s just finishing off a caterpillar of some sort.
Today, we have a couple of grasshopper nymphs that were turned up while sweep-netting in tall grass on August 23, 2012. The first one is your basic green grasshopper. It’s almost mature, as it has visible wing buds, but it has at least one more molt to go.
