What is that bug?!

August is nearly over, and I can’t wait for autumn to start. It sounds like the bugs outside my window feel the same. In the last few weeks, there are welcome sounds of late summer. Near my apartment building there are bamboo thickets, stands of trees, and a river from which I hear higurashi at twilight and suzumushi late into the evenings. I know them by their calls, but I’d be hard-pressed to identify them by appearance.

Original photo art made with LunaPic

I told you before about resources for getting to know Japan’s birds, and I went down some rabbit (bug?) holes looking for insects. If you’re simply looking for native and endemic bugs anywhere in Japan, a good place to start is 身近な昆虫図鑑 (Mijikana konchū zukan), the National Parks Foundation’s guide to common insects. The search allows you to look up by name - family or species - in Japanese. If you don’t know the name of the insect, try searching with season, region, color, and the classification button which lists 14 types of insect.

For bug-hunters who want to know every last taxonomic detail, try the Institute for Agro-Environmental Science’s Insect Inventory Search Engine. The search engine has both English and Japanese language search pages. For budding entomologists, it’s a great way to learn the taxonomy terms in both languages as there is a tree search for both Latin and Japanese classifications of insects.

Now, I’m on the hunt for a smartphone app to identify bugs. I found a few, downloaded one, tried it, but got turned off by the in-app sign-up fee.

Can you recommend a reliable bug-identifier app? A freebee?