Old Cedar Bugs

If you have been a constant visitor to Ecobirder you may have noticed that the number of posts featuring insects has decreased dramatically from a couple of months ago. That is because winter has arrived and early this year and days with high temps in the 30s are a bit of a problem for the insect community. So the only insects that I see these days are the occasional spider that Michelle, my wife, hollers about or once in a while a centipede that my kitten Misty is stalking with her mad bug pawning skillz. Don't worry though I am saving some bug picks to post through out the winter to continue to bring you as much variety as possible. One of the last time that I went out and photographed several insects was at the Old cedar Bridge area at the beginning of October (10-2).
All during the late summer and fall my bug photography was hampered by grasshoppers. Most of the places that I visited where filled with grasshoppers at that time of the year. As I would walk through the fields, or even down dirt paths, quietly stalking a butterfly or dragonfly grasshoppers would go flying from the grass in front of me. Like an early alert system they would startle my prey which would, very often, take off right before I got my shot.

Once in a while I would get lucky though and my subject would not notice the hoard of grasshoppers fleeing before my gigantic size twelve hiking boots. Like this cabbage white butterfly who was too intent on sucking the nectar out of this flower to notice my approach.
This eastern tailed blue did not even flinch when it came face to face with my 9" Canon zoom lens.

Woolly bear caterpillars are a sure sign of fall. During the falls months, like October, they quit their eating and look for a sheltered place to hibernate for the winter. When the temps warm up again and spring arrives the woolly bear will wake up and spin a cocoon. A couple of weeks later they will emerge as an isabella tiger moth.

Going buggy at Dodge Nature Center

Saturday the weather was sunny and beautiful. I had a dinner appointment later in the afternoon so I decided to do some birding close to home. So I took a trip to Dodge Nature Center in West St Paul, MN. I have not been to Dodge since I was a kid and it is really is a shame. The property has a diverse collection of ecosystems which includes grassland, wetland, and deciduous forest. They have a few ponds, a working farm, and mews for educational raptors. I really enjoyed the farm pond trail which is a boardwalk that takes you through the cattails and over the pond, with several stopping areas with sitting benches. During my trip I saw a few different birds, I will post those pictures in a later post, as well as reptiles and small mammals. There were also a lot of insects, I took a few pictures of some of the more interesting ones which I found.

There were quite a few cabbage white butterfly flying about near all of the flower gardens.

It is easy to distinguish between male and female in the cabbage white by counting the number of spots. Males have 1 spot, like the first one pictured, and females have 2 spots, like the one right above.

I found this pink-spotted lady beetle on a rock in the farm pond next to the boardwalk. I really like the contrast in color between her and the green algae around her. This would have been a better shot if I had my macro lens, which was in the car, instead I had to stand a ways back to get my 100-400mm lens to focus on such a tiny subject.

This female white-faced meadowhawk was flying around the farm pond.I was not quite sure that she was a white faced until she turned around.
Later on I found a white-faced meadowhawk male out in the fields. It is pretty easy to tell the difference between male and female by the color.There was quite a healthy population of grasshoppers. There were also plenty of mosquitoes but I am usually too busy swatting them to take their picture.