The Bugs Come Out at Night

Bugs are something to reliably count on seeing every summer evening in Prescott, at least for now. Luckily they're usually not the annoying ones: houseflies besetting your face, mosquitoes biting your ankles. Instead more colorful, less hyperactive nocturnal insects creep out of the shadows.

When the porch lights switch on after twilight, it only takes an hour or so before moths appear on the scene. These lepidopterans share a large family with skippers and butterflies, varieties that I mostly see during the daylight hours. The nocturnal moths are just as attracted to my home's lights during colder temperatures in the fall and spring. While many are colorful, it's their wide variation in size that's most notable, ranging from a tiny couple millimeters to almost the width of a hand when the polyphemus moth pays an infrequent visit.

If monsoon rains have drenched the landscape, June bugs - despite the name, it's usually July when they start showing up in Arizona - are guaranteed to buzz your porch or deck, alighting close to a light source. Other beetles like the rhinoceros, stag and chafer are normally not too far behind. In addition, the glorious scarab - an apt name if ever there was one - shimmering in its chartreuse exoskeleton almost always joins the parade.

It seems the second half of the summer is when grasshoppers and mantises make most of their appearances. Because they're both bright green and similar in size, a quick glance might confuse one with the other. The grasshoppers making night-time showings contrast with the brown, clickety-sounding varieties that populate Prescott's trails and fields during the day. In fact, the nocturnal ones are probably a type of katydid or bush cricket which draws attention to the fact that there are thousands of grasshopper species. (By the way, there are up to ten million insect species on Earth, making up an astonishing ninety percent of all animal life!)

I've observed the visiting praying mantises devouring large prey, like moths, in the shine of the porch light, an act that reminds me of a gruesome fact about this species. A female mantis often bites off the head of her male sex partner shortly after copulation, followed by her eating his body. I don't allow my cat Josie, a confirmed killer herself, any stab at this bug; I revere this cannibalistic creature as the queen of the insect kingdom and probably others too. However I do let Josie munch on the occasional katydid and small moth, delicacies compared to her daily kibble in a bag.

For the second year in a row, the monsoon season is not delivering its usually reliable thunderstorms and rainfall. While June is the driest month on our calendar, August is normally the wettest. I can't help but imagine all the flora and fauna that have adapted to this weather cycle and that are affected by extreme variations.

Last year, the summer's water-fed explosion of wildflowers was a disappointment: no purple and red trumpet vines on forest trails, only a sprinkling of black-eyed Susans on the sides of the roads. With warm, dry nights and more and more socially-distanced time alone on my cabin's deck, I worry I'll start to miss the bugs too.