Thread by @UrsulaV

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS LOOK LOOK LOOK LOOK WHAT I FOUND IN GARDEN LOOK

IT’S A DUNG BEETLE!!!

I am so excited! You see, I had dung beetles for years, and you know what I didn’t have to do for any of those years? Clean up dog poop in the yard. It just...went away.

And then, foolishly, I switched brands on my flea & tick med to Bravecto. One pill, three months, sounded miraculous.

And then I started to find piles of dog poop with dead dung beetles nearby.

I took them off the stuff as soon as I recognized the connection, but it’s been two years and stuff no longer just...goes away. I have been cursing myself for carelessly killing my favorite labor-saving bugs for years. Particularly now that there’s four dogs generating poop.

BUT THEY’RE BACK!

Ok! For those surprised to learn there are dung beetles in North America, there are actually dung beetles everywhere! We’ve got like a hundred species here! And they’re fantastic, complicated little creatures.

In fact, the African dung beetle—which I have seen in Botswana, and was a magnificent palm-sized creature—is the only species known to navigate using the light of the Milky Way.

Anyway, I am just so pleased!

OH HOLY SHIT A HUMMINGBIRD JUST WENT BY ASKGHDGJ!!!! THIS IS A GLORIOUS DAY IN THE GARDEN

First hummingbird of the year! Female rubythroat. I usually get at least one female raising a brood in the garden per year.

Another handsome swallowtail! I think it may be a Spicebush Swallowtail, though sadly I’ve never yet succeeded in growing spicebush for them.

Pipevine and tiger swallowtails hang around all the time, though.

My goodness! What a marvelously buggy day in the garden! Check out this spectacular cicada molt!

The celandine poppy is making lots of seed pods. I’ll scatter some of them in the woods but honestly, this plant just grows where it wants and ONLY where it wants.

One of the tomatillos is an overachiever. You aren’t supposed to flower yet! You haven’t got enough leaves! Your stem couldn’t support a fruit! What is this silliness?!

Speaking of overachievers, do you know that if you move sheep in your truck and then hay in your truck and you never clean your truck and then it rains, you get grass? In the back your truck?

The unkillable rose is ridiculous right now and smells amazing. This makes me remember the bit where I hate it the rest of the year.

No, wait, the other way around. This makes me forget that I hate it the rest of the year. In my defense, it’s eating the path again.

Ahhhh a golden backed snipe fly went by and I couldn’t get a photo. These frustrate me. They’re a big black fly with a huge, showy gold splotch on their back. They’re widespread! They’re easy to spot! And what do we know about them?

NOTHING!

We don’t know what they eat. They’re...maybe...predatory on other bugs? Because other snipe flies that look kinda like that are? They lay eggs...somewhere? Probably? That being a thing you’d expect? Their larvae presumably exist?

We know they fly around in the woods and there seem to be a bunch of them and the females are a little bigger than the males, and sometimes you see something that’s probably the larvae on rotting wood. Probably.

This kind of ignorance over a dirt-common bug in my own garden terrifies me. We know more about planets orbiting distance stars than we do about some of these bugs.

Anyway, that’s the garden walk for today. Hope you’re well, Internet! Stay safe!