If it quacks like a duck...

Well it may not look like a duck and it certainly does not sound like a duck or a stink bug either, but it certainly smells like a stink bug. Leaffooted bugs are important fruit, nut, seed, and vegetable pests. Stink bugs and leaffooted bugs have similar life cycles and similar feeding preferences. They also resemble assassin bugs in size and shape. They  are generally brown with white markings on the wings, body and legs and are from .75 to 1 inch in length. They get their name from the flared and flattened leaf like lower portion of their hind legs.They over winter as adults and emerge in the spring to begin feeding in the spring. They have piercing sucking mouthparts and feed on plant juices. They use their saliva to penetrate and dissolve the contents of their chosen food and then suck up the digesting mixture. The saliva damages the surrounding cells and leaves a somewhat corky or spongy mass of silvery white cells. The healthy cells continue to grow around the damaged areas forming an injury known as catfacing.
Eggs are laid in rows and the bright orange-red colored soft bodied immatures congregate in masses to feed on the host plant. The young nymphs cause much of the feeding damage.  Not only will the eggs be laid in the vegetable gardens they may also be deposited on Jimson weed, goat weed and various grasses. Their ablility to feed on a wide variety of plants makes controlling them a problem. 
To protect themselves from predators the bugs are able to secrete foul-smelling, foul-tasting fluids from their bodies. Birds, spiders, assassin bugs and other predators will feed on them inspite of the foul fluids. This foul odor becomes more of a problem to us in the late summer and fall when the leaffooted bugs begin looking for overwintering sites. They consider our houses a well protected site, suitable for overwintering, when they can find a suitable crack or crevice into which to wedge themselves. Under the bark of fire wood is another common place to find these insects, and when the log is added to the fire it is soon evident that there was a hitchhiker aboard the fire wood.