Duck face

The weather went off again today, because of course it did, but I managed to get out in the garden with the camera while it was still only mizzling. Needless to say though, these conditions weren't any more attractive to the local invertebrate wildlife than they were to me, so I had to do a bit of fossicking to find anything worth photographing.

This distinctively handsome duck-billed leafhopper, which I swept from the yarrow patch, is one of the Aphrodes species, though I can't say more than that because according to the experts this genus can't be identified to species from photos. Statistically she's most likely to be Aphrodes makarovi, but there's no way of telling for sure without dissection, and I don't think she'd have enjoyed that very much.

She wasn't exactly keen on being netted and potted, to be honest, and kept hurling herself around inside the bug pot while I walked around the top garden trying to decide where to place her. She was quite big, at maybe 7-8mm long, and I could feel the impact every time she hit the inside of the pot and bounced off it. I'd already lost one even bigger hopper, which sprang clean out of the net, past my face and away over my shoulder, because I spent a fraction of a second too long admiring it and trying to think what it might be, and I was pretty certain I was going to lose this one too, as soon as I released her from captivity.

In the end though, she was surprisingly cooperative. Well, maybe cooperative is putting it too strongly. I upended the pot on the arm of the garden bench, then checked my exposure settings and focus before gingerly removing the pot - only to find that she'd climbed back inside it and showed no signs at all of wanting to come out. It took several smart taps of pot on bench to dislodge her, but after that she sat pretty still while I photographed her. She was probably concussed. I then coaxed her back in the pot and took it back to the yarrow, where she said No thanks - it's wet out there, and I think I'd rather stay where I am, and retreated to the furthest end from the weather. After all I'd already put her through, it seemed only fair to leave her to come out in her own time, so I went off to hunt other things, and by the time I came back to the yarrow she'd left.