I realised recently that you can tell if a bug is thinking about blasting off, because it starts to flex and separate various bits of its exoskeleton. Ever since then I’ve been trying to capture the moment of take-off, and today I more or less managed it. I’d found this green shieldbug on a shaded tree and moved it onto the brightly sunlit quince, and the shieldbug was Not Happy At All. As it stomped around the leaf it slightly raised its scutellum (shield) and its leathery forewings, and then somehow seemed to move its pronotum (shoulder plate) so that there was a gap between that and its head, as well as the one you can see here between the pronotum and the scutellum. At this point all of its green dorsal plates appeared to be separated by broad black lines.
The bug then marched to the edge of the leaf and prepared to launch – but just as its membranous hindwings were starting to unfurl (and I was deciding that I wasn’t using a high enough shutter speed) it subsided and dropped its wings back down. It did a bit more more stomping and flexing, while I span some wheels and doubled my shutter speed, and then it returned to the same edge and took off. I’m featuring the earlier, aborted attempt because this is a better angle, and the image is cleaner and easier to ‘read’, but the second shot, below, shows the wings almost fully unfurled for the second lift-off. By the next frame in the burst the leaf was empty, as the shielbug (literally) buzzed past my ear.
I’d like to thank everyone who’s sent kind wishes following my positive Covid test yesterday. I’m still feeling pretty unwell, and I didn’t get up until lunch time today, but then I managed to spend a couple of hours outside, wandering around the warm and sunny garden, which lifted my spirits. R and I have both hugely missed the Boy Wonder today, of course, but we’re fully confident that he won’t have missed us, because our co-grandparents stepped into the breach yesterday and he’s been having fun times with them. One thing I did manage to get done during my ongoing enforced downtime today, was to post another set of Trench Wood inverts to my Facebook page, if you’d care to take a look.
