Winter Insects--Week 6

I'll start by apologizing for some of the pictures--my camera claims to be "all weather" but apparently it can't weather my toddler who I caught playing with the lens and now it won't focus when I'm trying to take a picture up close. We read through parts of the chapter from Discover Nature in Winter, but especially looked at the pictures together. Because our yard isn't landscaped we knew we would be able to look under rocks, leaves, composting weeds, and whatever else may be in our yard. We also looked at tree and bush branches, but we didn't find anything in these. Also, we didn't find much in the way of wintering insects, most of them were out and moving about (or not an insect at all).

Nyah and her trash, um, collection. Austin reading.

Our first find was a beetle under a rock. It is the blackish spot in the middle of the picture. If you click on the picture you can see it better, and also that is is more of a green color.
Unfortunately our yard is the lowest point on our street with the two houses to our right, and the two houses to our left, draining into our yard. So under a number of rocks we found mold growing, though it looks like it could be spider web. There were also some small aphid looking bugs, not exactly like aphids, but very similar.
Not a bug, but an earthworm- the whitish skinny thing next to the bigger stick.

Also not a bug, but a slug sticking to a rock. We saw plenty of these.

Under some leaves we found some tiny, black bugs. They are the black spots on the green weed in the center of the picture, and the leaf above and to the left of the weed.

Our biggest finds were under trash--cardboard boxes, paper plates, newspapers, apparently

our low point on the street means we get all the trash blown into our yard as well. This is a cricket by my fingertips. Around our front steps and concrete foundation we found a number of holes, probably leading to burrows of some kind.

A beetle, found under a cardboard box, in the company of several crickets, but they had the sense to dive for cover.

At the first sight of bugs Olivia headed for the stairs. She started to cry when the older two were trying to catch a cricket, and only came down when they had headed in a different direction.

There are two black spiders in this picture, see if you can find them.

We also found some more winter weeds. These two are both "mean" or so my kids say because of the thorns/stickers. This first one is a thistle, it has beautiful purple flowers when it blooms, but as you can see it would be crazy to try to pick one. I have no idea what this one is, but I've grown up calling it a sticker bush, and I had to pull some thorns out of my hand from touching one of these on our insect walk.