Robber Fly - Tumblr Posts
That’s wonderful to hear because I took more pics of that fella at the time
We literally didn’t know what robber flies were until encountering it so imagine a whole room of professional skeeter deleters in an enthralled circle around this bug. Obligatory PS to followers in case they find one of these: they can apparently bite. Really painfully. I didn’t know at the time and was either lucky or very unthreatening to the critter that it let me handle it like this. They’re extremely cool predators and kind of like bug vampires, catching prey mid-air and literally hanging from a perch to drink them like a spider.
Also huge thanks to @jack-of-all-inverts for letting me know that stag was in fact Lucanus capreolus
Other job-related honorable mentions:
Two lined spittlebug
European hornet
grasshopper sitting on a coworker
Barn spider
Annnnnnnd this thing
Thought @onenicebugperday would appreciate this but so I had been working as a pest control technician for mosquitoes over last summer. Obvs that much time outdoors lets you come across a lot of critters, and I decided since i haven’t had that job anymore since November it’d be fun to put together a little highlight reel of the other bugs I came across on the clock.
First off we got an impressive katydid
A quite photogenic snail
My favorite local wasp species, a cicada killer
A much more common and large red wasp
Local hanging thief. Absolutely badass looking robber fly who somehow got into the office building
Another robber fly encounter, this one was busy having a snack on a red wasp it has caught
BMSB that I would usually not like to see, but this one was literally in the middle of molting into the adult form and I loved how it looked like a forbidden peppermint
What I am going to guess is a very handsome stag
And of course, my actual target. Mosquitoes are certainly no uncommon sight but I managed to catch this one freshly emerged out of the pupa and that’s kinda neat
(Asian tiger to be specific, not native here but they sure be flourishing)
here’s a gnat ogre (Holocephala), a small robber fly that is indeed the bane of smaller flies like gnats and midges. not much escapes the detection of those big round eyes