Backyard Icons
Some insects earn their place by eating pests or pollinating crops. These earned theirs by being unforgettable.
Backyard Icons at a glance
Every insect here, rated on the same three scalesI score each one 0 to 10 for what it does for your garden, how much trouble it causes, and whether its sting or bite is worth worrying about. Same scales on every page, so the numbers are comparable.
Crickets, cicadas, and fireflies were singing, glowing, and swarming long before the first dinosaurs showed up.
Chemistry, Not Magic
Fireflies
A firefly's light is a chemical reaction so efficient it glows with almost no heat, and every species flashes its own pattern. Once you learn a couple of the codes, a June evening reads like conversation.
Populations are declining across most of their range, mostly from light pollution and lost habitat. The fix starts with your own porch light.
My firefly notes cover the flash codes and what brings them back.
Fireflies
The Seventeen-Year Houseguest
Cicadas
Periodical cicadas spend up to seventeen years underground and a few loud weeks in the sun. The chorus can hit a hundred decibels, a motorcycle at close range, produced by an insect the size of your thumb.
An emergence looks apocalyptic and harms almost nothing. I mark brood years on the calendar the way other people mark eclipses.
The Jumpers
Grasshoppers, Crickets & Locusts
The same insect can live as a mild-mannered grasshopper or, under crowding, transform into a swarming locust. That switch is still one of the strangest tricks I know of in the insect world.
Crickets carry their own party trick: count chirps for fourteen seconds, add forty, and you have the temperature in Fahrenheit. It works more often than it should.
Species guides and the field tricks are all here.
Grasshoppers, Crickets & Locusts
Hiding in Plain Sight
Stick Insects
Stick insects commit to camouflage so completely that some species sway to imitate a twig in the wind. I've stared directly at one for a full minute before seeing it.
They also make a good first pet insect: harmless and content to live on bramble leaves. Mine outlasted two houseplants.
The Middle Chapter
Caterpillars
Every butterfly and moth spends most of its life as a caterpillar, and identification is often easier at this stage. The colors are bolder and nothing flies away mid-photo.
A few species sting and most don't, and telling them apart is worth learning before you pick one up. I learned it the other way around.
Life at the Surface
Pond & Water Insects
A garden pond runs its own insect economy: water striders skating on surface tension, diving beetles hauling air bubbles like scuba tanks, dragonfly larvae hunting below. Most of it arrives on its own within a season.
The order of arrival tells you plenty about the water. I keep notes on who shows up first and what that means.