To turn the old story of The Ant and the Grasshopper around, here's a grasshopper diligently preparing for the next season by digging a hole in the ground and laying eggs in it.   Hard to be more future-planning-minded  than that.  I was coming back from a bike ride on the land--and the wind was so blustery in my face that I got off in the north ( Read more... )

Over on the 80Acres blog, I've just posted pictures of wildflowers and insects.

One or both of the insects are new on our list.  I always thought weevils were ugly, but this one is kind of decorative.

Ever wonder what a net-winged beetle was, or what it looked like?

I spotted a pretty orange flying "thing" yesterday and got enough pictures to ID it.   They're posted on the 80Acres blog.

Small beauties today included a dragonfly not photographed before (but seen), familiar damsels, a Queen butterfly perched on crepe myrtle, a new spider, and the first tiger beetle seen on the place...recognized because of my experience with the one in Palo Duro Canyon.

First, the dragonfly, a male Twelve-spotted Skimmer, Libellula pulchella, ( Read more... )

I was hunting for the damselfy I got a blurry picture of two days ago, when I spotted a tiny fly hopping around on wet mossy rock right at the "flow-over" part of the upper water garden.  These shots aren't very good, but they do show how much beauty can be packed into something only 1/8 inch (~3mm) long.


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We've had an extremely dry winter and spring, with no measurable rain for weeks and temperatures mostly over 100 degrees F, with 111 degrees F one day for sure.  As a result, a young oak tree has just about died, and the west grass is already August brown.


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I went out today and found two new (to me) insects on the place.  One is this stink-bug nymph:


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One of the characteristics of the Order Neuroptera is even stranger eyes than most insects have  (they all have compound eyes, but a lot of them look, esp. from a distance, like little beads, all one color or maybe two.)    For a fun comparison, here are three different insects in Neuroptera, showing how different their eyes are:


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Today's fascinating beast was an adult ant lion that spend the entire day on the screen of my study window.  (Addendum: it now has a confirmed ID as Euption ornatum, with thanks to Dr. John D. Oswald at Texas A&M's Department of Entomology.)  Ant lions, or doodlebugs, are the larval form--they dig those pit traps you find in sand and dust.  ( ( Read more... )

Plains Coreopsis is one of the prettiest of the yellow Compositae here.   I don't know what the beetle is (I've put it up at BugGuide.net as an ID request)  but there were a lot of them on the prickly pear the other day.


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