Aster treehoppers (Publilia concava) are found in the eastern half of North America. The BugLady usually sees them on goldenrods, but they can also be found on several other species in the Aster family, and the (winged) adults may move to woody plants.
In mid-July, the BugLady ran into BugFan Freda. Freda introduced her to the Slender Bluet and the Lilypad Forktail, two rare (in Wisconsin) damselflies. A week later, at the north end of the Cedarburg Bog, The BugLady photographed a damselfly that turned out to be a mature female Lilypad Forktail.
The BugLady had a “Stop the Presses” moment as she was writing this week’s BOTW. When she hiked down to the mailbox, she saw a fly that she had never seen before, from a family she’s never seen before, skating over the top of a leaf, and she bumped it to the head of the line.
When the BugLady was walking in the woods at Riveredge the other day, she found some plate-sized, stocky, very aromatic, gilled mushrooms growing out of the ground. Then, she saw something moving on the rim of an “over-the-hill” fungus.
The BugLady hopes that you’ve been getting out on the trail and drinking in the lushness of the summer. Subjects of this summer’s survey include wasps, aphids, syrphids, and katydids.
The BugLady was checking around the edge of a gravel parking lot near the Ozaukee Washington Land Trust’s Lake Twelve property when she found this beauty She had two immediate reactions: 1) what is it? And 2) it looks like an octopus clinging to a reef!
Here (the BugLady looked up the collective noun for moths) is a whisper of moths. Mostly porch moths; mostly under-biographized; mostly, to borrow a term from birders, “LBJs” – Little Brown Jobs. Subjects include White Spring Moths, Bruce Spanworms, and Bronzy Macrochilos.
The BugLady is always excited when she finds an insect she’s never seen before. She was moseying along the trail at Riveredge Nature Center at the beginning of July when she saw a flash of orange in the vegetation. A big flash. She craned and fidgeted and crossed her fingers while the beetle crawled around, revealing itself by degrees.
Slime molds are strange and wonderful life forms that can exist as tiny, single cells, but can also form a mass of cells that acts like an organism – and moves! They may be so small that they live their whole lives under our radar, moving slowly through the soil; or they may aggregate to form bright yellow or white, spongy blobs on the forest floor, or pink spheres on decaying wood, or tiny, brown cattail shapes on branches.
The BugLady loves these fancy little flies and their habitat preferences, for the damp and the dappled are similar to hers. Dance flies are abroad in June and are one of the BugLady’s “nemesis bugs.”
