The Urban Pantheist

A calliphorid fly (bottle fly) warms up on a leaf.


The reproductive parts of a daylily beckon luridly.


Japanese honeysuckle ready for a chance encounter with a hummingbird.


A tiny grasshopper nymph (subadult that hasn't molted into a winged adult) just hours or days old, ready to eat soft tender vegetation.

Imagine my delight when our first excursion into the streets of St. Louis resulted in finding a new (to me) species!

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Story time! When I was a wee lad, playing in the grass and dirt, I used to find field crickets Gryllus pennsylvanicus* all the time. They are fairly large, kind of easy to catch, and totally harmless. I would catch them and play with them and then put them back on the ground. One day--a day of tragic mis-indentification--I tried this, but the large black insect on the ground turned out to be a mud-dauber or similar wasp. For that I earned the most painful sting of my young life, right in the meat of my palm below my fingers. It left a mark that lasted years.

But I still will pick up any insects or spiders I find! I'm just more careful and hopefully more knowledgeable now. This fall field cricket (indistinguishable from the spring field cricket but for chronological habitat) is a large female. You can see her huge needle-like ovipositor between her cerci at the back of her body. The ovipositor which is thankfully NOT modified into a venom-delivering stinger as is the case for many wasps, bees, and ants. Field crickets sing the summer into existence and chirp away into autumn--the chirping is a song made by the male with his little brown wings, to bring a female close by. The frost destroys the crickets, but leaves their eggs behind, to hatch into next year's crickets, to sing us a new summer.

*Pennsylvania cricket, sure why not--it could have been named for any state, really--it occurs in all of them except Florida, Alaska, and Hawaii.

There are lots of adult grasshoppers jumping and flying about these days. This may be a red-legged grasshopper, but without a dismayingly close look at male genitals, it is nearly impossible to identify this genus to species.

Young grasshoppers, like this Melanoplus sp.* look just like miniature adults, except that they have no wings. They do have the disproportionate femurs that characterize the group and make long jumps possible. In various places grasshoppers are considered among the worst agricultural pests. In our back yard they're a colorful visitor that eats the weeds and feeds the birds.

*From Greek melano dark, plus suffix -plus, meaning "clad in dark armor"