Cuckoo wasp

A cuckoo wasp (Chrysis angolensis species, I believe) takes a shine to the milkweed leaves.

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Two looks …

curious and wary                    exchanged                    on the footpath …

Carolina mantis (Stagmomantis carolina),  I presume?

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Curiously

Curiously of a sudden

a fork-tailed bush katydid (scudderia furcata)*

appears, out of somewhere, to greet

the latest monarch release.

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*Best guess. Out of the eight species of bush katydid (scudderia), the fork-tailed (s. furcata) is said to be most common. Compare scudderia at Katydids North of Mexico.

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Consider it a compliment

basking on your porch cement

a sunny young goldfinch

met the cool near summer’s end

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feed after feed …

Barely visible Myzocallis asclepiadis aphids in various life-stages

cling to the bottoms of milkweed leaves that I glean to clean

and feed to the season’s last monarch caterpillars.

All summer these underleaf-feeding aphids have been dropping what ecologist Anurag Agrawal calls “honeydew” excrement for ants and maybe others to eat on the leaftops below (a process just beyond the discretion & ability of this camera — so we’ll take his word for it).

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Acanalonia conica …

How often, so easily, might we overlook you, leaf-like little planthopper.

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“Enjoy yourself …”

Northern flatid planthoppers are common here on the stems of plants they might eat.

But I could not resist the dramatic image of one on the ground it will someday feed.

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ID Reference (U of DE)

 

Eye to eye

Every power of concentration must meet in vision to make out
a tiny gnat ogre (in the family of robber flies) watching for even tinier prey
at a narrow tip of milkweed.

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Wild pearl

Called the sulphur pearl in its native Europe and a carrot seed moth in North America,

Sitochroa palealis was first reported in the U.S. in 2002.

But we just met, the two of us, hanging in the grass of national moth week.

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Heat waves

Ceaselessly it seems waves of cicadas sound swells

and breaks upon the heat of day.

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Pictured: Neotibicen tibicen tibicen
(aka morning cicada, swamp cicada)

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