First, a rustle in the leaves. I look down at my feet, and this time I don't see just some little dot, it is something big, over two inches long. It is an American Bird Grasshopper, one of the largest and handsomest of our species.
They are out every month of the year, even January, if the day is mild. They eat grass, and there's always some grass somewhere, and they must have a way of getting through real cold weather, sheltering somewhere. It is a common experience, even on a sunny day in midwinter, to flush one from the undergrowth and have it fly off in a direct line twenty or thirty feet, then land in a tree about ten feet off the ground. It's the large size and the powerful flight that gives it the name bird grasshopper.
There were also a few flies around. Flies, for all their fragile appearance, seem to be the commonest group of insects active through the winter. I saw, for instance, the usual Winter Crane Flies, and I saw another (or maybe the same) Tachinid fly that I had photographed for an earlier winter blog. And here was another fly that we regularly see in winter, especially in our house.
This, I believe, is the Northern House Mosquito (Culex pipiens). It can be a vector for West Nile Virus, but not at this time of year, when I don't believe it is biting. Male mosquitoes feed on plant juices, and probably females (like this one) do too, but when females are developing eggs, they need protein, which they get from a blood meal. But at this time of year they aren't mating and egg-laying, they're just waiting out the winter. Adult mosquitoes of other genera such as Aedes don't survive the winter. They lay eggs singly in low places that will be flooded in the spring, and the various species overwinter in the egg form. When the low spot fills with water, and when the surface tension in the water weakens a bit (indicating that plant material is beginning to decay, which provides food for the larvae), the eggs wake up and begin developing. The House Mosquito, on the other hand, lays a raft of eggs on the surface of the water, something it can only do in the summer, since ice would kill the floating eggs. So this mosquito hibernates not in the egg form, but in the adult form, seeking sheltered places to overwinter, which is why we often find them in our house at this time of year. This one was on the wall of my garage.
They of course are common, in fact commoner than we like, but the next fly I saw was a bit more special. It was a very small reddish fly that didn't look very interesting, and I just took a quick snapshot of it, not being very careful, and so getting sort of a blurry picture.
I took a second quick picture more from the side, and then I saw in my viewing screen the fly was more interesting than I had thought, but before I could take a better picture, it flew away.
I got out my huge tome, Flies: The Natural History and Diversity of Diptera, by Stephen A. Marshall, (2012) and looked it up. It was in the family Heleomyzidae, in the genus Suillia. It had, among some other interesting features, the outer margin of the wings armed with sharp spines, as you can see in this blow-up (and here is where I wish my pictures were sharper):
I didn't see any explanation for these spines, but generally this sort of armament on the leading edge of the wings (there are some similar cases with butterflies) is for battling other members of their own species over mates or territory or food sources.
As for spiders, the usual one was out, Pardosa milvina. There is scarcely a day I can't find one, but now suddenly they have greatly increased their numbers, and when I walk along over the fallen leaves, the little black dots of their bodies are streaming away from me. I can see six or eight at a time, almost up to spring numbers.
There was one more creature out on the day that I saw all of these. It was the size of a dot with legs like threads radiating out from it, so that the whole was about half an inch in diameter. Some kind of baby spider? I used my digital magic to take a close-up picture then download it onto my computer, then blow it way up on my computer screen.
Not a spider but a spider relative, a Harvestman, so tiny it must still be the size it was when it came out of the egg. But it had already managed to lose one of its hind legs, though it would molt its skin enough times to regrow another one. These, like the unrelated crane flies, are also often called daddy-longlegs. Like some crane flies they can also get quite big, 2-3 inches across with their legs spread out. Here's something to notice about them, if it has never been pointed out to you before: They don't have antennae ("feelers") like insects, instead they use their second pair of legs like antennae. If you look you will notice they are much longer than the first pair. The next time you see a harvestman, watch it walk, and you will see it sweeping its second pair of legs over the ground ahead, like a blind man with his stick.
So, a little bit of life to cheer me up through the long cold days ahead. I think it's appropriate then to sign off with this happy-face bug (Banasa euchlora) I just saw crawling up the outside of our front door.
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