Some sort of wasp.

Cicada killer? Was it a BIG wasp?

I'd swat it!!!

It was maybe an inch in length.

As long as there's not a big nest in close proximity to people I don't have a problem with wasps. They're decent predators and help with pollination, too. Some of them hunt spiders to lay their eggs in, when the eggs hatch the larvae/grubs feed on the spider. The white cocoons on tomato worms are the babies of parasitic wasps that laid their eggs in the worms. I once watched a wasp drag a paralyzed spider probably 35 to 40 feet across grass and a concrete patio...then up the wall of a garage to its nest...that was amazing!!! Here's a video I made of part of the wasp hauling it's prey home...

samanthagee said: It was maybe an inch in length.

That is kind of small for a cicada killer, definitely towards the smaller type. There's mainly three different kinds (sizes) of cicada killers that live in different parts of the country. The "humped back" look that this wasp has is interesting.

Here's a pic of a cicada killer wasp dragging a cicada to its hole. It was so heavy that it couldn't fly, it just dragged it, I wished I saw how far it managed it, but here it's pretty close to the hole it had under my trash bins. I'm not sure it's the same as your photos, but could be.

Cool!

Antennae seem wrong for wasp. Cool photos, Nancy and Ed.

Samantha, where are you located?
Might be a sawfly. There are many different ones, check this
https://extension.sdstate.edu/...

This page loaded slowly, not sure if it was my connection, but worth reading
https://www.missouribotanicalg....

It's not your connection. They forgot to use thumbnails for the images so you're waiting to load 6 images that haven't been compressed that are 6500+ pixel width. Plus they don't really give you an option to view them full screen, you can only right click and save the image to see them full size. Ridiculous waste of bandwidth, but I think the bottleneck is happening on their end. Even 35000 kb shouldn't take that long to load, but their site is very popular.

Thanks Nancy! I find MBG to be a reliable resource and I've never had trouble opening/loading their pages before so maybe this one's a mistake.

I use them quite often too, something else might be going on with their site today.

Murky said: It's not your connection. They forgot to use thumbnails for the images so you're waiting to load 6 images that haven't been compressed that are 6500+ pixel width. Plus they don't really give you an option to view them full screen, you can only right click and save the image to see them full size. Ridiculous waste of bandwidth, but I think the bottleneck is happening on their end. Even 35000 kb shouldn't take that long to load, but their site is very popular.

Yep, slow loading on my dismal DSL connection. You can open them in another tab, too, not a lot faster but maybe a little.

That sawfly image *does* look a lot like the Samantha's UFO.