Absolute unit

I was practising some Haydn in advance of a choir rehearsal - an assertion that might surprise anyone who had the bad luck to be sitting in my vicinity later in the evening - when R arrived at my desk, stuck a phone photo of a squashbug in front of my face, and said,  "It's on the wall next to the back door. Oh, and, it's massive." Shoving a macro lens onto the R5, I scuttled downstairs and out onto the patio, where the bug was now heading away up the wall. 

After some undignified scrambling around I managed to get it into a bug pot, and took it into the kitchen. R put down some white paper and produced a secondary light from somewhere about his person, and I attempted to de-pot the bug so I could photograph it. While it's probably not strictly accurate to say that it braced its legs across the entire width of the pot, it is true to say that it resisted my efforts, and succeeded in staying put. Then it suddenly decided to emerge, and began running around at high speed, as we frantically tried to keep it corralled and I attempted with increasing desperation to get even one approximately focused shot. 

As I got more and more stressed I became increasingly clumsy, and at one point I'm sorry to say that I accidentally dropped the empty bug pot on the poor creature. R and I both yelped - me thinking this was going to provide a whole new definition of the term 'squashbug' - but the bug shrugged off the pot like The Terminator, and kept on marching around. I finally got a handful of shots when it decided to climb the outside of the pot, and then carefully carried pot and bug to the back door. As soon as it sensed fresh air, the bug took off and disappeared into the night - no doubt hoping never to see me again. I confess that the feeling may be mutual.

Although I didn't know exactly what it was, I knew I'd seen photos of something like it very recently, and it didn't take much more than a few seconds for me to identify it as a Western Conifer Seed Bug. This is a species that's native to North America, but it seems to have been accidentally introduced to Italy (probably in a shipment of timber) about twenty five years ago, and since then it has spread rapidly across the continent. Every now and then there's a noticeable influx into the UK, and from social media posts I think that may have been happening again recently. There's a page about the WCSB here, if you'd like some more proper facts. My only other comment is that R was absolutely right: at around 2cm long it's an absolute unit.

D: C5, D28.