I looked through my Audobon field guide to no avail.  The bug just didn’t appear to be there.  So I got out my huge hardcover book on insects and slowly went through the hundreds of shots, hoping for a match.  After some time, I may have found a match.  This appears to be a spider beetle – family Anobiidae, subfamily Ptininae.  Here’s another shot of it.

Unfortunately the shots I found in the book and those on the web have so far not provided an exact match.  I suspect this may be because my book covers only insects in eastern North America.  For some reason, I have noticed that many books seem to discount the western half of the United States.  Perhaps this may be because they don’t want to dedicate large portions of a book to insects that only exist in one geographic area.  I remember as a young child being dismayed after seeing an interesting animal in a guide book only to find that it only lives in the West.  Still, this makes it even more difficult for us in the Puget Sound.  Though we share many insects with the East, we also have a number of our own which don’t seem to be covered in many guide books.  Even the Audobon guide, which supposedly covers the entire country, tends not to cover insects particular to this region.

Therefore my current theory is that this is indeed a spider beetle, but is either a less common species or a species isolated to this part of the country.

Even still, though this remains a bit of a mystery it is always exciting finding and learning about new creatures in my backyard.

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