AUTUMN MEADOWHAWK – Were there dragonflies?  Indeed, there were!  The last of the migrating darners and saddlebags passed the tower during a spell of Florida weather in September.  Starting in early July, six species of meadowhawks occupy the second half of the dragonfly season, but they drop out, one by one until, in early October, only the White-faced and the Autumn (formerly Yellow-legged) meadowhawks remain.

STRIPED SADDLEBAGS – And there was one very special dragonfly.  Striped Saddlebags live south – way south.  About their range, bugguide says, “Normal range from Northern Argentina to northern Mexico with regular movement into Arizona and Texas and more rare movement north and east as far as MN, WI, MI in the US and NS in Canada.”  So it’s pretty exciting to find one!  

The WESTERN CONIFER SEED BUG is a large (¾”) and dapper member of the Leaf-footed bug family (Coreidae).  People mistake it for the invasive Brown marmorated stink bug https://bugguide.net/node/view/2494360/bgimage, but it’s slimmer than the chunky stink bug.  WCSBs are typically found on conifers – when they’re not gracing the BugLady’s porch rail or trying to get into the house in fall (according to the Mass Audubon website, “They can also be easily captured and returned to the outdoors—bluebirds love them! There is no need to resort to insecticides. Chemicals are dangerous—Western Conifer Seed Bugs are not.”  They don’t eat your furniture or house plants, but they do suck sap from and damage conifer cones, seeds, twigs, and sometimes needles.  Originally a resident of the Pacific Coast, they have moved east (and have been exported (accidentally) to Europe).  If your goal is natural forest regeneration, WCSBs are unwelcome guests.  They may deploy a smelly chemical when alarmed.

MONARCHS – There’s a time, as the Blazing star (Liatris) is fading and before the New England aster starts up, when the prairie is yellow, and goldenrod nectar fuels migrating Gen 5 Monarchs on their journey south.

MOURNING CLOAK – The migratory/Super generation of Monarchs lives a long time – emerging here in late August, overwintering in the mountains west of Mexico City, and getting at least part of the way back to Wisconsin in spring.  Mourning Cloaks live even longer.  A graph at the wisconsinbutterflies.com website shows that sightings start in early March and run through the start of November, but unlike other species that produce several generations to span each season, there’s only one generation of Mourning Cloaks per year. 

The Mourning Cloaks of spring have overwintered as adults, and as their caterpillar host plants (mainly willow, elm and birch) green up, they feed, breed, lay eggs, and die.  Their eggs hatch and their caterpillars feed and pupate, and the butterflies emerge around the summer solstice.  They feed for a while and then tuck themselves into a sheltered place to aestivate (become dormant) through the heat of summer.  Yes – they start flying before the parade of spring flowers has begun, and yes, the next generation sleeps through the flowers of summer, but Mourning Cloaks are mostly indifferent to flowers.  They get minerals from mud; they feed at sap drips (they’re often seen in the sugar bush in early spring, but they can become dormant again if winter revisits); they like rotting fruit, dung, and the honeydew produced by aphids, and they check the feeding holes created by Sapsuckers.  By the time they lay eggs the next spring, they’re about 11 months old.  

FIERY SKIPPER – Good things come in small packages – this dynamite little butterfly is about an inch long, with an inch-and-a-half wingspread.  Fiery Skippers are a mainly-Southern species that filters north into Wisconsin by mid-summer – a long haul on those short wings.

LARGE MILKWEED BUGS (these are nymphs) come in Large, Small, and False.  They’re in the Seed bug family Lygaeidae; they make their living by inserting their beak into the seeds within a milkweed pod, pumping saliva in to soften them, and sucking out the juices.  They’re very social and don’t mind sharing a good food source, and it’s possible that adults send out some kind of chemical signal to attract other adults.  Adult Large milkweed bugs can survive on non-milkweed seeds, but their nymphs can’t.  They aren’t considered a pest unless you’re growing milkweed for seed, and they make a spectacular splash of aposematic/warning color https://bugguide.net/node/view/2440573/bgimage.

Birds migrate, Monarchs and Common Green Darner dragonflies migrate, and so do Large milkweed bugs!  It’s too cold here in God’s Country for them to overwinter in any form, so they repopulate the state in spring, after the milkweed is up.  As with some birds, northern populations are long-distance migrants (and have longer wings to prove it) and southern populations don’t stray far from home.

A BUMBLE BEE busy collecting pollen for a brood that will not survive the winter.

The FALSE MILKWEED BUG looks like a Small milkweed bug (https://bugguide.net/node/view/2361061), and it’s even in the same genus, but it’s not sitting on milkweed.  The BugLady usually finds them excavating the seeds of Ox-eye sunflower, aka the False sunflower.  One note at bugguide.net says that if they checked their collection of Small milkweed bug pictures, they’d probably find a bunch of misidentified False milkweed bugs.  Nice video of False milkweed bugs multi-tasking at the original BOTW, here https://bugoftheweek.com/blog/2021/7/16/false-milkweed-bug-aka-false-sunflower-bug-lygaeus-turcicus.  Their doppelgangers are poisonous/distasteful due to the toxic milkweed sap they ingest.  False milkweed bugs are adorned in aposematic coloration, but as far as the BugLady knows, they are not poisonous/distasteful.  Are they cashing in on predators’ predisposition to avoid red/orange and black? 

ANT FLIGHT – A hatch of royal ants emerged from their digs in the pressure-treated wood at the edge of the hawk tower’s deck (not reassuring).  The royal dance attracted to the deck three tree frogs that usually live around the base of the tower and perch on prairie flowers.

This FORK-TAILED BUSH KATYDID joined the BugLady on the tower and lingered for a portrait.  The large curved structure, aft, is her ovipositor (the male has the “forked tail”).  She inserts her eggs into a leaf edge, between the upper and lower surface of the leaf, or lays them on twigs or leaves.  And there’s nothing out on the prairie that’s cuter than her jaunty, little nymph https://bugguide.net/node/view/693504/bgimag,  https://bugguide.net/node/view/2143463/bgimage.  The BugLady is far more likely to see a Fork-tailed bush katydid than to hear one – as this site says, “Pffftt!” That’s all it is. There can be a lengthy pause between songs” https://www.listeningtoinsects.com/fork-tailed-bush-katydid.

BLACK AND YELLOW ARGIOPES, like some of the other orbweavers, get pretty hefty by the end of summer, alarming some folks.  “Where did those huge spiders come from?” they ask.  Answer – they’ve been here all along.  They were smaller than the brightly-colored heads of push pins when they emerged from their egg sac in spring, and they’ve been eating ever since. 

This TREEHOPPER’s thorn disguise would be more effective if it were sitting in vegetation.  Just sayin’. 

BUCKEYE BUTTERFLY – Buckeye caterpillars https://bugguide.net/node/view/1737799/bgimage pick up a group of chemicals called iridoid glycosides from their foodplants.  These chemicals stimulate their appetites so they eat and grow fast, but have the opposite effect on their predators, stunting their growth. 

Buckeyes are migratory, too, moving along coastlines and rivers, flying to the Deep South with a tailwind in fall and returning to us (a few generations later) in spring, with males arriving first.

Fun Fact about Buckeyes: flowers may change in appearance after being pollinated – maybe a clue as small as a localized color change.  Researcher Martha R. Weiss did an experiment that demonstrated that a wide variety of wasp, bee, fly, and butterfly pollinators (including Buckeyes) can discriminate between “pre-change” and “post-change” flowers, and so can see which flowers will be more rewarding to visit – a win for both flowers and butterflies. 

Bonus points if you know where the Benét quote came from.

Go outside – look (and listen) for bugs!

Kate Redmond, The BugLady

Bug of the Week archives:
http://uwm.edu/field-station/category/bug-of-the-week/