Not the very best picture I would have liked to get, but really not bad given the falling light outside and the tininess of this guy, maybe 12mm long all told -- antennae and ovipositor in.

It's an ichneumon wasp, perched on our kitchen window at suppertime, and viewed from the inside, thus his uhh, downside. (Uhh, not his, not guy: the ovipositor indicates it is a female.)

I have a warm spot for these guys, these insects, partly for how pretty (and harmless to us) they are, but partly too because they were pivotal in Charles Darwin's atheism. How could, he asked, a benevolent god design an animal whose way of life was to place eggs in the bodies of other animals (other insects), eggs that would grow into larvae eating the host out from the inside, often keeping it alive as long as possible before it inevitably died? These parasitoid insects exist -- here's one -- and logic told him gods do not. Certainly not gods of the sort his schoolteachers would have had him believe in.

Some modern entomologists, eschewing difficult-to-pronounce names like "ichneumon," prefer to call them Darwin's wasps. Nice.