Along the road to bugville in autumn.
Springtime wildflower blooms on Figueroa Mountain capture all the attention.
But I’ve long marveled, too, at the winter ladybug blooms of the mountain.
December 2023
I hold onto a childhood memory of ladybugs blanketing big logs around Upper Bear Camp along the headwaters of Sisquoc River.
The bugs are one of only several memories of our long walk through from NIRA to Upper Oso.
Last year on Figueroa, ladybugs fluttered through the forest air on sunny afternoons so thickly in places I thought I might inhale them and had to cover my nose and mouth when passing through.
I wonder if at times they might bloom in swarms so dense as to make hiking impossible.
NPR: A Swarm Of Ladybugs So Huge, It Showed Up On National Weather Service Radar
I see them more usually, however, clustered by the thousands on logs and branches and across the forest floor.
I once saw them en masse lining the individual stalks of blades of foot-tall grass that bent and swayed in the breeze under their weight.
February 2022
Jack Elliott's Santa Barbara Adventure 
Thanks for the cool photos. I can well remember the time one evening while backpacking in late fall when I first came upon masses of ladybugs hibernating on rocks and logs along a stream on the north side of the Topa Topa Mountains in Ojai. Night was setting in but I hadn’t pulled out my flashlight yet when I stopped to stand on a boulder while crossing the creek. I thought I was hallucinating as everything around me was moving. That was the day I learned why that spot is named Ladybug Camp.
Another time I was camping at Fishbowls Camp on the north side of Whitethorn Peak when the clusters upstream came alive one morning and I found myself standing in an aerial river of ladybugs. That’s when I learned something else. Ladybugs bite! Not too painful but multiple nips can be annoying.
Since then I’ve learned a third thing about ladybugs (besides the fact that they are beetles, not bugs). Did you know that there is a name for a gathering or swarm of ladybugs, just as there are such names for birds? It’s a loveliness of ladybugs.
Thanks for the stories. I had used the words beetle and bug interchangeably until, at the end, it was just all bug.
Hooray for seeing swarms of ladybugs. Lovely.
Not sure why, but we call the ladybirds over here!
When I was a kid, back in the 60s, we used to go to summercamp at MacKenzie Park. One time a few of us climbed up the hill closest to Las Positas. The shrubs there were seething with ladybugs. 1,000s of ladybugs. It was so special. I’ve since, over the years, rescued loads of ladybugs off local beaches (and brought them back to my garden), but I never again saw masses of them like the ones we saw that summer.
Fine post. Has me looking at the maps and wishing I was 30 years younger and it was spring. Merry Christmas
We don’t get them in masses like that in Britain – just the odd few. We were amused once, while sitting in the sun in a churchyard, to see two mating – we thought that was amusingly improper in a churchyard!