Excuses for these three months? Car problems, COVID, and a crazy lot of writing work. No time, restricted life, and no way to get around with the free time that would arise. So I've been making mental notes, and getting pictures here and there, and finally am getting around to adding it all to the list.
Spiders first. I'm not all that scared of spiders, but. . . I woke up to a Giant House Spider on my wall. This killed a couple hours of my day, in part because I have seen one before. The Giant House Spider is like... 5 inches across. That's fine. I have no worries about that, and comfortably believe that they are not a threat to people. All of these things I can state and believe.
They also happen to be the fastest spider in the world.
That's the kind of information that the brain doesn't really need. I sat there and looked up at this thing wondering. . . how does that fact translate into my life at this moment? If I try to kill or remove this spider, is there going to be a flurry of spidering that I'm just not ready for?? So my options were 1) just kill it and be done with it 2) just put it into some Tupperware and walk it outside and be done with it, or 3) leave... and come back and wonder where it went, or 4) sit and watch for the rest of eternity.
I tried plan 4 for a bit, but eventually gave in. Plan 2, phase 2a was to send an exploratory poke up towards the spider to see what fast looked like before actually trying to catch it. He (I assume, based on my reading of September spiders) dropped to the ground and ran. . . at 1/498750439872 the speed my brain had imagined. I got him into some Tupperware and out to the yard. I felt good about it but was given layers of doubt afterwards. "You may as well have killed it. They live in houses - it won't make it." but then I also read that it was invasive (and when is that ever good?). So in the end, I don't know what happened to the guy, or even what my hopes for him were.
Other stuff:
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| Narrow-collared Snail-eating Beetle |
Wow. This was kind of a fun find! Not only was it pretty easy to identify, but. . . it is doing its job in the picture, chomping away on a poor slug.
What is this??
An image of the locust:
There's a lot to like about the comparisons here - they are very similar in color and structure. Nothing jumped out that was obviously off and that shows in both pictures really well.
Bird Grasshoppers:
This is attributed to "Karen" on whatsthatbug.com. It's so similar, although the little loops on the legs are pretty prominent in every picture I saw for this species (and many of the pictures looked very different from this one!), so I am inclined to think that it was a Carolina Locust. The habitat also matches up - my picture was taken along a dry powerline cut, which was almost exactly what most sites considered prime habitat for this widespread bug.
Boreal Bluet
I did make a run up to Snoqualmie Pass (just inside the 425!) for a July hike. There will be many other pictures to sort through, but this one was a fun find: A Boreal Bluet! This is a damselfly found at high elevations in the Cascades, and it stayed still long enough for me to get 10 bad pictures and this pretty passable one.
For the identification, I want to azdragonflies.com, and found this:
The bar is tough to see, but all other markings matched up well. Other bluets are so similar - it took a few rounds of looking through them to settle on this.
Firefly?
No picture, sorry! Hiking at Squak Mountain, I saw this little guy. My friend snapped a picture and used an app to identify it as a firefly. I asked for it later, and he'd deleted it, because it "wasn't a great picture". (He needs to see the images in this blog!). I was surprised to hear that there are absolutely fireflies in the Pacific Northwest - they just don't glow! Ellychnia is the genus, but there are many species within, and I couldn't have made a guess just from my recollection of the beetle.
Updates have me at 205. . . but there's actually quite a few flowers and fungi to get through. 425 is going to be a stretch at this point, but it will be fun to push it and see what I can find!
