I came to Vermont for a conference, but I arrived a day early to do a little sightseeing. One place we visited was the Green Mountain Audubon Center outside Huntington. It is a really lovely place to wander around for several hours. It has a hemlock swamp, a gorgeous river running through it, forests full of ferns, and lots of pretty flowers. We also saw a few nice birds, and I saw some really cool looking insects, which I cannot identify.
Fern forest
Huntington River
Swamp
American red squirrel
Beetle?
Chestnut-sided Warbler
Fern frond
Milkweed
Insect
Flower
The beetle looks like this guy:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/473
although I’m not sure what the spots on its thorax are. They might be mites. (lol)
The bug on the white flower is probably Lygus, either L. lineolaris (altough the head’s not exactly right):
http://bugguide.net/node/view/16892/bgimage
or L. shulli:
http://bugguide.net/node/view/478705/bgimage
I love BugGuide!
Thanks for finding those. I took a photo of another one of those beetles, and it has one white spot on its thorax, and the spot is dead center. It is interesting if the white spots are mites that they would be symmetrical, the two on the one I posted, and the one on the other one. If they were mites, I wonder if that would be a coincidence, or normal way for mites to attach?