Autumn Zebra

I found the guy who has been eating our mail: Photo: brown patterned snail shell

Judging where it falls amongst my photos, I took this on boxing day. It's not a fantastic photo, but it is interesting how much wear-and-tear there is on the beetle's exo-skeleton. In fact, it looks kind of dead, but I'm sure it was alive. Oh, that's right, we found it on the pavement in the hot sun and it was barely moving so I moved it to the edge under a bush. Photo: blackish waisted beetle with a lot of whitish patches around the edge of it's body, like paint worn away.

I have finished making my compost bin (pictures later?) and today got grass from our garden rubbish pile to put in the new compost bin, and then was getting decomposing stuff from our plastic compost bin to put on as the next layer before covering it with more old grass and leaves. The plastic compost bin never really produced any compost in 5 years, but never got full either - it is a black hole of kitchen refuse and weeds. So I took off a layer with the garden fork and was stunned by how many worms there were. They were everywhere, crawling away from the light. There were big tangles of them squirming around getting in the others way so that they couldn't escape. All different sizes of worms. I'm not even sure how such a small amount of compost could support them all. Also, the compost was very dense, and there were areas that probably got little air and did not decompose much at all, so it didn't really look like a good worm-farm kind of matter. I decided not to put a...

Just some not-terribly-good pictures of what I think is some kind of sheetweb spider that I took ages ago - by the look of it I took them inside at night in a plastic container. It is not only a sheetweb spider in that it builds sheetwebs, but is actually one of the Sheetweb Spiders with capital letters. There are 29 known species in NZ of Sheetweb Spiders with capital S's. This is a male because of the longer legs. Like with many spiders, it is written in my book that the males often come inside looking for a mate. I don't know why they all think the women spiders will be living in people's houses.

I found this cicada on the side of our house a month or so ago.

Ages ago we went for a walk over some farmland towards a beach on the peninsula, although it turned out we couldn't get onto the beach as it was blocked off due to breeding penguins or something. I saw lots of new bugs on this trips. I think I saw a native bee, and I saw a butterfly (I've seen butterflies on about 4 occasions in the last 5 years; they're not very common), and I think a stiletto fly - they live near beaches so even though I only got a quick look and had never seen one before, it's a reasonably likely identity. I also got pictures of this beetle, which is apparently a tiger beetle. They live in holes in clay banks, which matches the landscape in which we saw them. They are fairly well camouflaged. The ones pictured in my insect book are Cicindela tuberculata which looks very similar to these photos, and apparently looks very similar to the most common South Island tiger beetle, Cicindela latecinta . Since I am in the South Island, I assume this is what i...

Today is the first day of spring because a giant bumble bee flew in our window, and it is the first one I have seen this seasonal rotation. It flew in the window and I though it must be some giant alien insect come to kill me it was so noisy, but it turned out to not be that after all. Now, the giant bumble bees, especially those flying around at the start of spring, are the QUEENS. They have to lay the eggs, collect the food and raise the "children" all on their lonesome until the first little larvae turn into big grown-up bees and start helping out around the house. So, please don't kill them and please rescue them if they get stuck. I like all bumble bees, but I don't mind so much what your response is to a small one later in the season, but wiping out a potential nest in one blow is a bit harsh. Another thing is to not leave blue containers out where they can collect water as the bumble bees will fly in and drown themselves, being attracted to the blue. What if yo...

The cat caught a cave weta of some type this evening, but I rescued it before it was hurt. Here are some photos; I think it is gorgeous. To start with is the worst photo, but also the most overhead and thus "overview" kind of one. Now, two better ones. It was hard taking photos of it, I couldn't get enough light. I have to work out a better way of taking photos of insects at night (indoors, but I mean there's not enough light for closeups from our lights).

So, not much to say here other than, "here's a crane fly!" I first found out what they were by emailing Landcare Research after not being able to find it on their website , describing it as looking like an enormous mosquito. Not knowing much about insects at the time, I didn't realise that a mosquito was a fly, and therefore this thing with a similar body shape would (probably) also be a fly, and that therefore I could, for example, look up giant flies on google. It's probably simply a "house cranefly" or similar. As you can see, it has a very nice wing pattern. From the tip of it's "nose" to the end of the wings is 3cm, and the legs as it sits there spread 8cm, but apparently you can get bigger ones. Anyway, I thought it was good of the Landcare Research people to reply to people's pointless emails about giant bugs in their bedroom - good on them!

I wanted to make a case for my knitting needles so that they had somewhere tidy and sensible to go, and it was going to hold crochet stuff as well (although I never crochet, but you know, you need the stuff anyway...) but I decided to make a smaller case to hold the crochet needles by themselves. It is made of linen, and has a beetle embroidered on it, and ties up with a finger braid cord I made. Pictures below: The cord is made of fairly fine thread so takes a while to "braid" - it uses 5 loops of thread to braid it, so 10 strands. It's my first proper actual use of one of these braids (which were made in the medieval and tudor times for tying and lacing all sorts of things) other than using one to wrap a present for Mum's birthday. There are various problems with how it is sewn so I will make the knitting one more carefully, and maybe embroider TWO beetles on it. Maybe I'll even have better photos of those beetles.

These photos aren't as clear - aren't as good close-ups - as most of the previous bug photos, although the second one isn't too bad. The first one was at Mum's house on my birthday - yay, a birthday beetle!! I think it's a type of long-horn beetle, but isn't one of the 22 or so in my book, although it looks most similar to the "pallid longhorn" (Calliprason pallidum, was Stenopotes). The antennae aren't very long for a long-horned beetle, but they only have to be 2/3 as long as the body to be considered long, and the male often has longer ones than the female. The second looks to be some kind of "waisted ground beetle" (the corset-like waist effect is not as visible in this photo as it could be) of which there are 60 species in NZ, so unsurprisingly my little book did not go into them.

I'm probably possibly going to start writing some more on my blog again, so to start off this burst of activity, here's a picture I prepared a while ago that I don't think I've posted yet. This one has had only a sliver cropped off the side to make it more symmetrical, so is basically as it was taken - it's nice to take a picture that you don't need to change later. Here is ... a dronefly on a flower. And here it is close up (the aforementioned picture cropped around the fly) - looks like a bee. Taken with your everyday type of digital camera (Mum's one), which had a large offset error in the view finder when taking closeups, and it was too bright to see anything on the screen, so I had to "point and guess" to actually get the whole flower in the shot. My new camera has no viewfinder at all because apparently no one wants them when you have the screen, so about 25% of all the pictures I took this weekend were entirely "point and guess" ...

So, moths are generally boring and ugly, and tend to mostly look the same (small and brown-grey) but still the insect books devote large amounts of space to every species of moth you might possibly come across. (They also devote a quite disproportionate amount of space to butterflies; I see one butterfly a year, but they take up one tenth of the book. I used to think I saw a few more, but they turned out to be day-flying moths.) Anyways, yesterday there was an annoying big moth in the house, so I got my special bug-catching plastic container and caught it to put it outside since otherwise they fly around in the bedroom when I am trying to sleep and I can hear them, and sometimes they crash into my head. But then I thought, since it was big and seemed to actually have some markings rather than just being brown, I would look it up in my insect book moth section. And, there it was, quite - fairly anyway - clearly a "slender owlet" moth. Since it had stopped fluttering around ins...

So, there's these solitary predatory wasps that live in our neighbourhood, and in other places around Dunedin that I always noticed and wandered what they were because they're kind of large, and red-orange. Then this year, when it was summer, or whatever that non-freezing, not-constantly-raining season is, I saw lots of the wasps/the same wasp many times doing all sorts of stuff around the garden. Mostly that stuff was looking for and killing spiders, looking for a nest spot, and then dragging the spider to the nest. One time after it had found itself a spider and dragged it around a bit and then gone off to look for places to put it, I got the camera (which has since been taken by an evil university student) and took pictures of the rest of the dragging process. I also sent two photos to the museum and Anthony Harris at the museum said it was "Sphictostethus nitidus (Fabricius, 1775) with prey, Miturga sp. The wasp is the red spider hunting wasp, in the family Pompili...

The online shop "Edible" has rare and unusual food items such as chocolate covered ants and Thai curry crickets or even sugar-free toffee-candy with an edible scorpion inside. You can order them and eat them. There are non-insect products like the "brandy like liquor fermented in a cask with lizards" and a lollipop made of ground pearls and sugar. The stuff is fairly expensive although it's not like you're likely to be buying it frequently. They seem to ship all over the world. I'm not sure if I would want to try any or not. Maybe. http://www.edible.com/shop/

Somewhat alarmingly we found this spider yesterday: And this one today: It looks like it is rock-climbing: What's up with all the big spiders? One is not alarming in itself, but two in two days? The second one was smaller than the first. It had legs about 3cm long, and a body about 1.2cm long. Here's a bad picture of the larger first one in a container held in G's hand: For some reason he did not leave it on the wall for me to take good pictures of. The pictures of the second one are better - you can see it's hairy legs, etc - and you can click on them to see big versions! Yay!

I wanted to make a larger bustle for Victorian dresses requiring more of a "bum". I got lots of pictures of those available from the pattern companies and a few I found on online auction websites. I am going to make a wired one at some point, but I thought it might be quicker to go with this one first: (The image is from this great page comparing the different bustle patterns from various companies .) G remarked that the bustles in general looked like caterpillars crawling over someone's bum! To me this obviously meant that I should try and make MY bustles look like caterpillars. I did a bit of caterpillar research. (Click on the image for a fascinating larger image) There were a few that I liked - well actually I liked all those pictured which is why I drew them- but I thought the easiest one that adapted best to the medium was simply the striped one in the lower left corner. I have noted there that the orange is really more yellow :). This page contains a picture of bo...

I don't think I will get my corset done by Friday as I would have liked, so I shall break up the monotony of corset posts with an insect, since we don't have to get them all in by Friday anymore. I'm pretty sure I've talked about weta before, but this is a DIFFERENT weta from the last one. All the weta before seem to have been Ground Weta, as opposed to some type of cave weta with one back leg. Remember, there are "Weta", of which the ground weta is one, and then there are "Cave Weta" which are a different set of insects, although obviously fairly similar. This looks like a type of cave weta, as decided by looking at about 10 pictures in total of the two types, and using the great neural net we humans have as a brain to process and distill the information therein and do a bit of pattern matching... Big picture!! YAY!!! It's in a plastic container so that it doesn't jump away. If anyone has an entomologist for a relative or friend, ask them wh...

Our cat seems to love catching insects in the dark and then bringing them inside and tormenting them and lying on them before eating them, although sometimes she just leaves them on the floor if they are moths. It can be useful to get rid of annoying flies. I don't really get why she lies on them or rests her head on them, particularly since whenever they move she sits up and shakes her head around, as you would to if a beetle tried to crawl into your ear. And cats have comparatively large ears. On at least a couple of occasions, including just a few days ago, our cat has caught a weta. I really like wetas and think they are pretty awesome. This seems to be pretty much at odds with the views of everyone else, who apparently think they are very ugly, and various native names basically mean ugly bug. New Zealanders may be unaware of the fact that wetas are in fact found in a variety of countries, generally those somewhat near NZ or that used to be joined to it along time ago, like Au...