bug project journal #2

Time for a review of all things buggy around here, since it's been a month since the first update. I have to say at the onset that this study is looking quite a bit different than if it was a project I was planning for my students at school... let's just suffice it to say that I've been a bit lazy this summer (it's SUMMER!), and I haven't so much sought out or planned a whole lot for this study so much as we've just spent low-key time stumbling into really cool bug adventures. (It's very easy to hunt for bugs in our own yard. Even that I can do during summer.)

We have been fortunate to have some neat discoveries, and I'm trying not to beat myself up too much for all the lost opportunities for extending this learning, so instead I'm just going to focus on the bits of this that have been really positive. Like, for one, Red recently stated, "I'm not scared of spiders anymore! I'm not scared of bumblebees or any bugs!" One of the major goals in starting this particular project is accomplished right there! For another, Pudge is participating BIG time in this study. With our bird project, he would point at birds and tweet-tweet a bit, but with this one, he's finding his own bugs, excitedly pointing them out to me, and grabbing the mini-magnifying glass while shouting, "See it! See it!" He's older and he's being immersed in this process where we are hugely interested in exploring one particular idea. He spends a lot of time simply keeping me updated every time he sees another bug flying around. "Bug! Bug! There he is!"

On to the list. This picks up where the first post left off, about mid-June:

*Field trip time to the "Wings of Fancy" exhibit at Wheaton's Brookside Garden Conservatory. Man, do I ever LOVE this place. You walk around an enclosed greenhouse filled with tons of butterflies, so of course, they land on your head and other assorted places and kids just squeal with delight at the sheer number and amazing accessibility of the butterflies.

Red checks out a Great Eggfly butterfly on JAM's arm.

We ponder the case of chrysalises-- AMAZING, while JAM consults our guidebook.

Pudge is beside himself with delight! More! More!

Red and JAM look at the specimens available with handy-dandy magnifiers.

*On our walk through the gardens heading to the butterfly exhibit, lovely hubby had spotted a really unique looking caterpillar on the walking path, thankfully before our stroller wheels found it! We took it with us to the conservatory (also hubby's grand idea!), and he hitched a ride in the stroller drink tray. The woman there said he looked like a Spicebush Swallowtail caterpillar, and they just happened to have a spicebush right there in their outdoor butterfly garden. So, he got a new home away from rolling strollers and walking feet, and one with just the right food!

*In reflecting back on the trip, some of Red's thoughts were:

"They have pointy things- those are their nectars- they go to their heads. They did this [bobs her head up and down]. They were trying to eat their plants. They sucked their nectar up."

"The caterpillar on the path was even differenter than the caterpillars we saw in the cage."

"The chrysalids was cracking the butterflies out!"

*Red and I had a girls' day with a friend and her three-year-old daughter to the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History, which has an amazing Insect Zoo area and currently is hosting an exhibit entitled: Farmers, Warriors, Builders: The Hidden Life of Ants. Other than a FANTASTIC time being had with our friends, the insect stuff was a blast as well!

The awesome discovery room for kids had beautiful butterfly specimen.

Look at this one, Mommy!

Checking out the metamorphosis chart.

The tarantula feeding was perfectly timed and we were in the right place!

Red and her pal hanging out, being termites in a mound. Good times.

A HUGE grasshopper that I wanted as a pet.

An even HUGER stick insect that I REALLY wanted as a pet!

Red giving some perspective for the stick insect, "It's bigger than my hand!"

*Some of Red's memories from the museum trip:

"The cricket hopped out of the box and then someone got it!"

"The tarantula ate the cricket, and the cricket looked like a grasshopper."

"I liked seeing the video- a monarch butterfly and a blue jay. The bluejay ate two monarch butterflies and he got sick!"

*Daddy and Red found some neat looking white-haired caterpillars on our back screen door, so we went to the computer and eventually figured out that they were Fall Webworm caterpillars. We caught two in the bug box, and provided a variety of leaves from nearby trees, not really sure which one they came off. Two days later, we only had one caterpillar in there... perhaps a caterpillar is somewhere behind a book on the shelf... But worry not, we soon found a replacement outside.

*Some of Red's observations:

"He has a little black head with a mouth sticking out."

"He has like 18 hairs!"

Red's sketch of the caterpillar.

*We also had the great fortune of spotting a little grasshopper in our yard. We could see and count his six legs, and Red noticed:

"I think this is a mama one."

"He has a green body."

"He is walking now, but he was hopping on the flower and the grass when I caught him."

When he hopped away, "Maybe he didn't want to be catched because he was too afraid of hopping on my finger."

*In searching for more leaves for the webworms, we found what we thought might be the host plant, since we spotted lots of broken egg cases all over the leaves! Red said, "That was so awesome finding those!" We brought one in to look closely with the magnifier, too.

*The kids were playing with some neighborhood friends when they all started freaking out about a BIG and NEW bug they found on the underside of the little tykes slide. I quickly pulled out the laptop and searched on my new favorite bug site, quickly discovering that it was a Dobsonfly! More of Red's thoughts, "It had dots on its wings," and "I think it's dead." Turns out, they're just nocturnal, so we were really bugging it at 11:45 am.

Everyone watching what he'll do after I moved him off the slide.

A blurry close-up of our Dobsonfly buddy.

*We also found a caterpillar molt and a HUGE cocoon on the underside of the kids' playhouse. Pudge couldn't stop saying, "WOW!" over and over while pointing at it. We poked around the molted skin and wondered what would come out of the cocoon.

*Well, I did some reading on my own about webworms, and then shared some info with the kids-- the webworm caterpillars stay in their pupa stage (cocoon) all winter, among the dirt and debris underground. Ugh. Since we wouldn't be able to house these guys for a full year, we decided to let the caterpillars go on the tree where we thought they came from-- we were pretty confident about it being the right tree, because they had been eating the leaves we brought from it like crazy!

JAM: "It's very sad, because I really wanted to see what they came out as!"

Red: "They look different as the tent caterpillars, because the webworm caterpillars have dots-- that's strange."

We sketched them one last time, and then said our goodbyes.

Hungry fella!

Crawling on JAM's sketch!

Letting him go.

Saying goodbye.

*Since we now had an empty bug box, we very, very carefully transferred the huge cocoon we had found the day before, yay!

Seriously, this thing is BIG.

*A few days later, we stumbled upon a much smaller cocoon sitting in the dirt just beyond our lawn. We added it to the bug box, too, but not before doing a little comparing and contrasting with our big cocoon. Red helped me record their sizes, using a "measurer," which you more likely call a ruler. The big cocoon is almost 2 inches long, but the little one is less than an inch!

*Exactly one week later, the huge cocoon was no longer intact in our bug box. We were surprised to see a very large whitish moth sitting on top of the stick! Red noticed, "It has many spots," and "She has antennas!" JAM and I had done some online research and had predicted that the cocoon held a Gypsy Moth based upon the caterpillar molt we had found as well as the leftover hairs on the outside of the cocoon. Guess what? Oh yeah, we rock-- we were totally correct, and to be more specific, our moth was a female and apparently was loaded down with eggs. So much so that according to what we found online, she can't even fly! The info said that after emerging from her cocoon, she emits a bunch of pheromones to attract a mate, does the deal, and dies soon after. Fun, huh? Well, we watched that day as she kept dripping a bunch of stuff out the pointy end of her body, but since gypsy moths aren't really the best insects for the trees, we decided to keep her in the bug box for a few days... I kind of figured if she was going to die soon anyway, why not just let her hang out in our box, right? More sketching abounded, of course.

Pudge just loved this guy, oops, I mean gal.

Our crappy camera can't take a good close-up, but still I try.

*Okay, I lasted three days. I couldn't bear it any longer. I figured that since she hadn't dripped any more stuff in a couple days, that she might be past her point of getting her tree-eating-eggs fertilized, and I couldn't watch her just sit in one place any more. So, we took her out and observed her for a bit before letting her go. She wasn't all that stable, and fluttered her wings but couldn't take flight at all. She could crawl, though, which she did up and down a tree trunk before settling on walking around the dirt.

Pudge's exclamations about where she was crawling and how she was moving: "Flowers! Flowers! Oh, tree, tree! Wiggling! Moth! No rocks! No rocks-- Daddy's rocks!" (Someone he knows gets in trouble for moving the rocks that are part of the landscaping...)

Red's observations: "She just had funny legs and she had white stuff on one of her legs. I could see her antennas and eyes!"

Clinging desperately to her stick.

"Tree! Tree!"

Seeing eye-to-eye.

*Another field trip, this time to the Patuxent Research Refuge, where we intended to take a much longer hike than we ended up doing (thanks to some award-winning histrionics on the part of a certain redhead we had with us), but along the way of our shorter walk we had the pleasure of seeing a really cool metallic green shiny beetle, many butterflies that were white on the underside and purple on the tops of their wings, several daddy longlegs (or harvestmen, if you will), and LOTS and LOTS of dragonflies by the lake.

*YAY!! While watering the flowers one morning, something caught my eye, but I really don't know how since it was so tiny. But, somebody really wanted to make sure that I noticed the very small (a baby??) Praying Mantis hopping on Red's tricycle! My heart was literally beating so hard with excitement-- such an amazing insect, and one that I figured we'd NEVER just happen to see. Wow. Red's first comment: "He has interesting legs." I love her.

More chances to use that magnifier! We had to use an impromptu bug box.

Learning from his big sister, "See it!"

Red's sketch-- I happen to think that her observational drawing skills are really progressing!

*The kids noticed a "funny noise" the other day, and I was thrilled to inform them that they're hearing the beautiful summer song of the Cicadas! We haven't seen any (yet??), but we can certainly hear their crescendoing song all day long. Red: "They sound like this [makes funny grunting noise]. No, they sound like... buzzing!"

*Well, the cocoon we found on the ground finally 'hatched,' but bad news... as Red said, "He didn't make it all the way because he was still in his cocoon." His wing had dried all stiff and one leg was still attached to the cocoon. "We let him go, but he could only walk." I was really hoping we'd be three for three, too. It looked like he could have been a male gypsy moth, but it was hard to tell without his wings being correct.

*While walking to the pool this week, I happened to notice something attached to a light pole- upon further inspection, it was a PERFECTLY intact cicada molt. Amazing. I took it down and showed Red and Pudge-- Red was really interested, but Pudge was instantly kinda grossed out. The expression on his face was priceless, and he leaned back in the stroller seat and just shook his head. We'll keep it around for a bit for observing, but my bet is that it will soon start to disintegrate.

*And finally... a fantastic source just let me know about this article about fireflies, so I think I know what will come next in this bug project!


Exhausted but so very interested in the buggy world all around us,