There’s not much insect activity these days, so it’s a good time to look back through last year’s photos and try to identify some of the images I’d labeled as “unknown.” Above and below is a tattered butterfly I saw in Oregon at fairly high elevation last summer. The varied orange to maroon color makes me think it could be a Mariposa copper (see reference here).
But the side view above looks a little more like an Anna’s blue. The males have blue upper wings, but the females have a variable brown-orange coloring. iNaturalist suggest two more butterflies as possibilities: the Purplish Copper and the Greenish Blue. Seriously! If the people naming these insects are as confuddled about colors and names as I am, we’re in trouble.
I didn’t even know where to start with this one, which I saw on the Oregon coast in June. Is it a fly? An immature bug? A wasp? It was just a few millimeters long, and moved really fast, around the edges of this leaf. The eyes and antennae look like a fly, but the wings look like a micro moth, and the legs look like a beetle or bug.
A Google image search led to a juvenile leaf-footed crusader bug that look mildly similar, but only lives in Australia. A form of long-legged fly also looked promising, but the wings weren’t right. So I submitted the pictures to BugGuide. They came back with what is so far labelled a “wild guess,” but I think looks like a winner: A coastal midge called a Chasmatonotus maculipennis. So far, BugGuide users have only spotted it in Washington state, but the insect is so small, it’s easy to believe it’s gone unnoticed in Oregon so far.
Cheers!
Ticklehead 