After you’ve seen them a few times, you stop being surprised at where you’ll find grasshoppers: crushed gravel roads, up in palmettos, on your pipevines. Still, when they let you approach closely, there’s no denying that they’re handsome beasts:
But no matter where you find them (trees, leaves, gravel), they’re still grasshoppers, not treehoppers, leafhoppers, or gravelhoppers. One of these days, I suppose I’ll find a real leafhoppper. Trouble is, they’re all pretty small, and I’m still barely learning the charismatic megafauna of the insect world (you know, the large showy creatures like butterflies, dragonflies, etc.), so I’ve probably passed hundreds of them by already…
I saw this one last November as we were outside with Eric, enjoying the lovely “fall” weather here in Florida: warm but not hot, breezy but not windy, nice low humidity. I guess there’s a reason people all these other people decided to live in Florida, too. Now that we’re in the middle of April, the weather is somewhat heavier, with a strong dose of summer in the air.