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The weather is still hot and dry, but the cool and maybe moisture is coming. The shorter days is definitely affecting everything from plant color to animal behavior.

More people are seeing these blister beetles around. While they look very odd, they still have the same basic body shape as a beetle. You can even see the elytra, or wing covers, but they look cartoonishly small next to that huge abdomen. They look more like shoulder pads.

 

 Insects have a way of adapting the size of body parts in absurd ways. Many wasps have large jaws and tiny waists. This species is still a mystery, but is some sort of thread waisted sand wasp.

Not all insects are weird or rare. The pigweeds (Palmar Amaranth and Kochia) seems to be important shelter for these tiny pygmy blues, but the largest numbers are active on the low growing splurge. You can watch small whiptails rushing out to snack on them during the hot sun.

The evenings right now are filled with the sounds of chirps and buzzings. As the cicadas fade away, the katydids are taking their place briefly, but soon the only sound will be the trills of the fields crickets like this one. As the nights get colder, even their voices will fade away.

This is a bold jumping spider AKA Phidippus audax. A ambush hunter with a jack o' lantern on its abdomen and green glitter on the fangs, or chelicerae. They have impressive vision and recognize humans, which most small insects just tune out, like humans do with clouds.

This arachnid is some sort of grass spider. This species build webs as a tent to protect an egg sac inside. Most spiders are not as flashy as the jumping spiders or orb weavers.

A close up of a sulphur and pink colored butterfly shows the Pinocchio snout that gives this genus the name of "dogface". Actually, the males have a silhouette of a poodle on their wings....allegedly. I don't see it myself.

The female grasshoppers are getting huge. There is quite a variety of grasshoppers and they all have a wide variety of colors sizes and shapes. This one is a green valley grasshopper.

I have not seen many ladybugs this year. But the sunflower crop in the bosque is not as impressive as it used to be. With aphids spread out more these hunting beetles are likely more spread out as well.

This little guy is a mining bee, this taxa has about 1300 species in it and are pretty small. The world of bees is pretty complex, not all of them are honey bees.

This one is a 'wanna-bee". A bee fly. The larva are parasites of other insects like wasps. This one is the "sinuous bee fly" or hemipenthes sinuous. That name refers to the wavy line that separates the clear part of the wing from the colored section.

This is a sapsucker with huge calf muscles. More specifically, the species Leptoglossus occidentalis has "characteristically expanded hindleg tibiae". The family is called the "leaf footed bugs" for some bizarre reason a scientist will never understand and a gardener could never explain.

 

 A higher elevations the seasons are shorter, but this weird looking tachnid fly is still able to collect nectar from alpine meadow flowers

In the valleys of the Sandia mountains on the Placitas side there are a large number of fruit trees left over from olden days. Many fruit trees like this plum species are still found and appreciated by the black bears in the area as fall approaches.

It is always hard to figure out a crime afterwards, but likely what happened here is that a young gopher snake was disturbed from a pile of leaves that was being taken to the communal dump. It was hit with a shovel (there is a gash on the neck) and thrown into the street for some unknown reason.

This large garter snake was in the mountain streams in Placitas (a long way away from a shovel) and is warming up on the bank after swimming upstream. He is wary of the photographer but settled down after a few minutes of watching each other. The black patch behind the stout neck suggests it is a Western blacknecked garter snake.

 

The bosque is pretty dry, but rain should be on the way. The drainage channels of the interior drain have worked as designed and the water table is now below the level of the channel. These characteristic hexagonal cracks hold an impressive amount of water and are important habitat for small insects, tiny frogs, and who knows what else?

The foliage has begun change color and the trees are starting to rustle as the winds move through the dried leaves. Hopefully gardeners leave some of them on the ground because there are many species that rely on leaf litter for both safety, and places to find food.