Cranefly

There's somethng curious going on, and if I hadn't been so obsessive about monitoring the flower flies, I probably would have missed this: close to the ground, the leaf litter has borne witness to a steady stream of large Crane Flies. I don't know these long-legged dipterans very well, and one decent identification site recently became Internet history, so I suspect that the Tipulidae won't soon become my entomological obsession du jour. But I do know that the crane flies are hugging the ground right now in search of potential mates. Earlier in my career, I would have also suggested that they were hunting for prey—they're commonly known as "mosquito hawks," after all—but this, I learned, was a misnomer. The adults lack the mouthparts to be predatory on anything, and if they eat at all, it's probably nectar. They're welcome to it... as long as they occasionally stop and pose.