Just because, part 38

Al Denelsbeck

I’m probably not going to get too many opportunities to post in the next week, and what will be posted probably won’t be… comprehensive, shall we say? “Hit and run” is closer to the mark.

I’ve had a lot of images saved in the blog folder, some for quite a while now – 260 total – and finally decided to sit down and weed out those that weren’t going to result in a post. Most of those were prepared with the idea that I’d write them up sometime, but I never felt that strongly about the subject; you may be looking at what I do post and wondering how badly a subject must suck not to clear that bar, and that’s fine, be that way. See if I care. But anyway, better than half are gone now, and that’s allowing for those that might still provoke a writeup. You know, in the winter months when there’s not that much to shoot.

I’ll also take the opportunity to put up a pair that remained, random images that I just never wrote up until now. Not like I’m lacking in images for this month, but hey, while I’m here…

Northern cardinal Cardinalis cardinalis showing loss of feathers on face
Taken back in July but pushed off by more distinctive subjects, this is what a northern cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis) looks like without facial feathers – I know I always wondered. Now, why the feathers are missing is not something that I can accurately answer, but despite the name of both the species and the state, this is the south, so my guess is an incident having to do with alcohol and a grill…

And the other.

eastern pondhawk Erythemis simplicicollis partaking of a misting at night
We often have a handful of dragonflies that hang around the front garden areas, and this eastern pondhawk (Erythemis simplicicollis) got disturbed one evening in August and flew around my headlamp for a few moments before I convinced it to settle onto a plant; dragonflies have rotten night vision and always ‘roost’ for the night, but if they’re disturbed they’ll attempt to use what light is available to navigate to another safe spot. Once it had settled, I favored it with a misting, and since this was during the extremely hot and dry spell that we had, the dragonfly was visibly excited and eagerly sipped up all the water it could, wiping it from its head as the mantids will, as well as taking it directly off of the leaf. I was kind of sorry I didn’t have the video lamp handy to show this in action; I really should have it affixed more often. And now I’m thinking about whether a combined macro/video rig is viable.

[There’s more to this than you might think. First off, macro (still) photos are shot using the viewfinder eyepiece, strictly direct light through the lens, while video requires either the back LCD or an external monitor, which tends to work better. This generally means having the camera in a video rig, but that’s awkward to use when trying to make lens adjustments. The macro flash softbox and the video light are not interchangeable in purpose. I’m not thinking there’s an easy hybrid method that would work…]

We need another

Al Denelsbeck

What the hell, I already posted twice today, and cleaned out the ‘To be sorted’ folder (long overdue) – then I take out the compost and spot another couple of images to put back into it. So what’s one more post in a day, between us?

The green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) that I spotted hanging out in the ant trap on one of our hummingbird feeders seems to have made this a regular haunt, and while it would normally be out hunting at this time of night (it’s 11:34 PM,) it’s been raining all day long, courtesy of a hurricane I think, and for some reason treefrogs don’t like being out in the rain. So here it sits, waiting.

green treefrog Hyla cinerea waiting for the rain to cease
By day, it’s normally hunkered down in there, barely visible through the filthy plastic, and I’ve noted its presence several days in a row now. But the Copes grey treefrogs (Hyla chrysoscelis) have been a lot more scarce, and I haven’t seen a full adult for a while now. Until tonight.

Copes grey treefrog Hyla chrysoscelis also waiting for the rain to cease
Two meters away on a downspout under the same roof overhang, a Copes grey also sits under cover away from the steady downpour, somehow not looking all that patient. To me, anyway – you know us experienced nature photographers can read the animals like a book.

[Sigh] And now I have to go sort another six images. Work work work…

More from yesterday

Al Denelsbeck

So, immediately after finishing this post, I ventured outside to watch for the moonrise, knowing it would be a little sliver of a crescent in the twilight just before dawn. Unfortunately, there was a serious buildup of humidity down on the horizon, producing a haze which wasn’t immediately apparent until after the sun came up and the sky just became white, but it was enough to obscure any indication that there was a moon there at all. Not unexpected, really, but I try when the conditions seem right.

Being out at first light with the headlamp, though, I spotted a subject that I wasn’t after, though wasteful, unfocused me will still get photos of such a thing anyway.

juvenile green treefrog Hyla cinerea in top of Japanese maple
On the top of one of the potted Japanese maples in the yard (we have three in pots right now, and a fourth which came with the house and has served as a backdrop for countless photos,) I found a juvenile green treefrog (Hyla cinerea.) This was notable to me in that, I knew we had a little one hanging around in the general area of the front porch, sometimes perching on the oak-leaf hydrangea by the window – but that one was once again back in its perch thereon, so this was another one roughly the same size. The overnight temperature had dropped a bit and it was chilly, so both were in position to catch the morning sunlight to warm up. I still have a handful of photos of the first one that I haven’t featured yet, so…

juvenile green treefrog Hyla cinerea poised alertly within pot
Here it is in a potted plant near the original maple, a region it remained within for a few days, but very protective of itself – I missed several photos because it never gave me the chance to get into position before it gained cover within the thicket of the maple leaves.

juvenile green treefrog Hyla cinerea peering out from under porch railing
Later on I found it spending the afternoon on the railing of the front porch, a surprisingly public area for something so bashful, and did a representative photo from an angle intended to give a certain impression – I think I succeeded. The next morning, it was out on the hydrangea two meters from this spot, so I’m fairly certain it’s the same one, while the potted maple sits three meters away – not a stretch at all, but if you have a better way of telling them apart, I’m all ears.

When the sun had risen, I did some daylight shots of the first one up there, wide open with the macro lens in natural light, for a different rendering of largely the same scene.

juvenile green treefrog Hyla cinerea hunched down to stay hidden while getting some weak sun
The pupils are capable of lending expressions to the frogs that are entirely inaccurate, since it’s just a response to how much available light there is, but hey, I’ll work with it anyway: this one’s pretending to be an alligator.

At roughly the same time, I moved a brick and exposed a juvenile ground skink (Scincella lateralis.) These are exceptionally furtive little reptiles that I spot every once in a great while, but never in a manner that I can photograph them. I hastened inside and got the macro aquarium as a holding pen, and was pleasantly surprised to find it still in view when I came back out so, bolstered by this cooperation, I set up a shooting session.

ground skink Scincella lateralis on sand
I got out a deeper glass casserole dish as a pen and lined the bottom with sand – not the typical habitat of the skink, but an accurate one of leaf litter and debris would provide too many hiding spots that my subject would immediately disappear into, so I made it impossible for the lizard to hide. I fully expected it to scamper to the sides and try to climb them, dancing anxiously against the glass in a wholly unsuitable composition, but it turned out to be remarkably cooperative, staying within the center of the dish for the most part, not moving a lot, and even taking some gentle nudges to repose.

juvenile ground skink Scincella lateralis in full length
You could put this down to torpor from the cold, which likely assisted, but I had already seen how the skink was capable of bursts of speed, so really, this was more helpful than expected. I was even able to switch lenses and go in very close for more detail.

juvenile ground skink Scincella lateralis in closeup
In fact, I was just missing a little bit of behavior due to the brief duration of it, which was to sample the sand with its tongue to see what was edible, usually having a few sand grains adhering to its tongue – you can see a couple still on its snout. Again, this is ordinary beach sand, to give you some idea of scale, but I managed a better one (since I didn’t have my paper scales handy, but this is better anyway.)

juvenile ground skink Scincella lateralis posed on author's fingertips
As I scooped it up gently to release it in the front garden (not far from the frogs,) it curled up and paused on my fingertips, and I started juggling the camera to see if the shot was possible – I’m actually amazed to have gotten it. This is especially noteworthy in that I had the Mamiya 80mm macro affixed, which requires the aperture to be closed down manually, and it’s spring-loaded so it has to be held down as it won’t stay in place on its own. This resides on the left side of the lens barrel. Meanwhile, the shutter release is on the right – you know, where my occupied right hand would operate it – so I had to cradle the camera and flash rig one-handed in my left, my thumb stretching up to the aperture switch, my forefinger stretched out across the bottom of the battery grip to contact the shutter button on the bottom of that, and still get the focus distance right. There’s no way it should be this sharp, but that just shows you my breathtakingly awesome skills. There was probably even some telekinesis keeping the skink calm during all this as well, so I got that going for me. Which is nice.

Later on that afternoon we did the kayak outing and met the beaver in the previous post, so really, a fairly productive day. I’m good with that.

Money well spent

Al Denelsbeck

smutphone image of sunrise and The Girlfriend on Jordan Lake
… or at least, so far. I doubt I’ll be regretting it.

The Girlfriend and I take the kayaks out every once in a while, so far only on Jordan Lake (though they’ve been out at both North Topsail Island, NC and Murrell’s Inlet, SC,) and the biggest frustration that I have with this – still admittedly minor – is that I have no decent way of capturing images or video of any of the things that we see out there. This has included bald eagles, herons, egrets, osprey, kingfishers, and even a surprisingly mellow green heron that appeared to be following my kayak from a minimal distance (like down to four meters.) I don’t trust the good camera equipment in a kayak, not to mention that the stowage would be difficult. So I was simply using the $25 smutphone in a waterproof case, and you know how I feel about smutphones; this impression did not improve in the slightest during my uses of it for these forays.

smutphone image of bald eagle Haliaeetus leucocephalus in tree on Jordan Lake
So the question was, what to do about it? While I would love to carry the serious lenses along, that’s way too risky with a kayak that might overturn (or even that collects drips from the paddles within.) I started looking at the waterproof ‘skin-diving’ bags that are available, but they would at best allow only a shorter lens, and there was still the issue of where to put it in a single-person kayak. I finally decided to get a dedicated underwater camera, one with the longest focal length I could find, and had that narrowed down to three different models, weighing options against price and how often I might be using it. The deciding factor came when I found the best model available used for a decent price, so I picked up a Ricoh WG-60, which also has macro capability, should I find myself pursuing macro subjects underwater (instead of using the macro aquarium.)

likely pin oak tree in shallows of Jordan Lake
Its first real test came yesterday afternoon, when The Girlfriend and I did an outing on Jordan Lake – the tree seen here may appear from time to time later on, because I like it and may do more experiments other than the quick pass that we did.

But the real find wasn’t a tree. While watching a great blue heron on the banks, I saw a branch behind it bounce violently, way out of proportion to the wind or an average sized bird, and I suspected a green heron or something larger, so we kept our eyes on it as we drew closer. The video tells it better.


We’re pleased with that, for sure – The Girlfriend has been gushing, actually. And this is probably the second-largest specimen that I’ve seen, quite impressive.

The zoom range isn’t significant, topping out at 140mm equivalent – not ideal for the eagles and so on, and it doesn’t quite have the quality of my other cameras, though this may improve with some setting and focus tweaks. I was just noodling around with it yesterday.

osprey Pandion haliaetus perched in tree at Jordan Lake
We were so busy watching the beaver that we missed an osprey in a low branch almost directly overhead, until it gave an irritated alarm chirp and took off. I had watched it fly around the point, though, and was ready as we rounded the bend to get this photo, though I was a tad slow on switching to video to capture it taking off again.

Like my other attempts at video, I still need to work on some things like maintaining a steady and level camera, avoiding any handling of the body while recording, and so on. Some of that will be unavoidable when I’m shooting from a bobbing, rotating kayak – the kayak retains the momentum of the last paddle stroke and will keep gradually turning in that direction, having already made me twist around in the seat to maintain a subject in the viewfinder (both of the smutphone and now of the camera.) Finding the best way to carry it will also be a project; a belt pouch is out, and even my pocket was tricky, since the sides of the kayak are narrow, and in the well between my knees or in the next-to-unusable stowage bin behind the seat are too awkward. The wrist strap would just make it bang against the sides as I’m rowing, so it will likely be an armband on my left bicep. We’ll see.

But yeah, even though I always push technique over equipment, any day of the week, sometimes getting the right equipment is what’s needed.

On this date 38

Al Denelsbeck

Old Well on UNC Chapel Hill Campus in infra-red
You may be seeing a pattern if you’ve bothered to look at the previous On This Date posts and have the faintest interest, which is highly unlikely, but back in 2006 I was doing a lot of experimentation in infra-red photography, and this image is probably my favorite. Or at least, the tweaked version is. Since you asked so eagerly, this is Old Well, a landmark on the campus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill – you know, the one with all the idiotic students that helped make North Carolina look dumber than a box of corn dog crumbs…

While that point can not possibly be belabored, there’s also not anything to add to it, so I’ll repeat it once just for the sake of it – UNC students are fucking morons – and move on to later dates.

hatching lady beetle nymphs
2012 was by far the most productive year for arthropod photos; to give you an example, this came from Arthropod folder 2, while a year later on the same date (which I’m not featuring today,) I was in Arthropod folder 4. Since I only allow about 4,000 images to accrue before going to a new folder, you can imagine how busy I was shooting bugs. And my subject here was part of the reason, because the lady beetles had taken to the dog fennel plants in the yard and done their full life cycles thereon, including the hatching of new nymphs from eggs, which is what you’re seeing here. Yes, cute little ladybugs start off looking like mini-Godzillas. Very mini, since they’re only a handful of millimeters in length so that’s, what, 1:1,000,000 scale? I’ll let you do the math. UNC students certainly can’t handle it.

head-on shot of male Enoplognatha ovata
Exactly six years ago (that would be 2014 for UNC students,) I was spending way too much time doing detailed shots of a spider known only as Enoplognatha ovata – specifically, its pedipalps, because hey, when a species has worked this hard to make something this impressive, it deserves the attention. I wrote it up in painful detail here, so check out that post if you dare.

And really, that’s about it – lots more insect photos, but nothing particularly fascinating or creepier than this, and 2014 was the latest that I shot anything on this date. Except for today of course.

[I type this, as usual, a day in advance, so that’s my goad towards making sure I shoot something today. Whether it will work or not remains to be seen – I can be pretty rebellious against myself.]

Four birds

Al Denelsbeck

Hmmm, it’s 5:09 AM with the next On This Date post set to go at 6:00. Can I do it?

On a slow outing yesterday, we nevertheless found a few subjects to shoot, and you’re about to see most of them. We’ll start off easy.

black vulture Coragyps atratus not too impressed with scarevulture
I mentioned earlier how little impact the Vulture Effigy program from the NC Wildlife Resource Commission was having on the vultures down at Jordan Lake, and a black vulture (Coragyps atratus) provided a nice little pose with the dead vulture that was intended to convince the live ones not to perch in the area. Maybe if they animated it, or made spooooky noises…

Among the subjects we were after were, of course, the osprey, or ospreys – I think the latter is correct, but you know, English rules are decided by dartboard. And while we saw a handful, there was only one aborted dive at a fish – just not an active time. But one wheeled overhead a few times when the sun was in a good position to do backlighting, so I fired off a few frames.

osprey Pandion haliaetus soaring while backlit
Curiously, the scientific name for osprey is Pandion haliaetus, while the one for bald eagles is Haliaeetus leucocephalus – so what the extra ‘E’ in there signifies I couldn’t tell you. And from experience, I can tell you that attempting to use standard English rules to pronounce any Latin names will likely result in error.

Among the first of the subjects to present itself was a female double-crested cormorant (Phalacrocorax auritus,) who circled around twice before coming to rest in an old dead tree right at the head of the point where we stood – so, a dozen or so meters away. Of course we took advantage of this.

female double-crested cormorant Phalacrocorax auritus jus after landing in dead tree
Just after landing, she hadn’t settled in yet, perhaps assuring herself that our shifting around underneath her posed no threat, but she did at least pose fartistically along the lines of the branches, so I’m good.

Later on, she’d settled in, ignoring us, but continued to survey the area, though what she was looking for I couldn’t say.

female double-crested cormorant Phalacrocorax auritus with head craned back oddly
… or maybe she simply had water in her ear.

Eventually, not finding other subjects, I shifted position and used the leaves of a much smaller tree nearby to do a little framing, because there was nothing else to work with, but while doing that, she gave an enigmatic pose while looking skyward.

female double-crested cormorant Phalacrocorax auritus surveying the sky
Best I could say is, she got separated from another, or a flock, and was watching for them to reappear. From time to time, other birds cruised by, including a black vulture joining her in the same tree, but she paid no attention to any of them.

And finally, another fartistic shot, one of the few that I liked from a pair of great egrets (Ardea alba) that danced around us in the distance. Too much time was spent shooting almost directly into the sun, washing out the sky and the colors of the birds, but this time it provided some background glitter, so we’ll let it go this time.

great egret Ardea alba crusing low over glittering water
There! Took about thirty minutes to write. Maybe I should always force a deadline and keep my verbosity down more.

Naaahhh.

Ah, but the moon!

Al Denelsbeck

Buggato has, several times, avowed that he was going to be up, having fun shooting sunrise, while I had to go into work, but somehow I never see any sunrise pics on his blog. Odd, that. But this morning, up far earlier than intended, I had my chance. Only thing is, the sky is perfectly clear and thus rotten conditions for sunrise, which needs humidity and for preference scattered high-level clouds to make things interesting. The crescent moon is up, though.

five=percent waning crescent moon
I had to take a selection of shots, both to pin down the best exposure and to pin down the best focus. Even at 600mm, the moon is small enough in the sky, and dim enough, that precise focus is very tricky, and it takes perfect focus to get the best details from the terminator, so focus and exposure bracketing were both necessary. This was the closest I got – potentially could be better, but certainly brings out some highlights. We’ll go in for a closer look at this same frame.

detail inset of five-percent waning crescent moon
This is full-resolution, at ISO 800 so we have a little colorful noise sneaking in. The shallow crater in the center, just seeing sunset on the edge at top, is most likely Grimaldi, which would make the crater to its right Darwin – it’s hard to tell when everything is on its side and I’m not sure where we are in the precession that the moon performs, but that seems to fit. The two distinct, smaller craters to the left are Krafft (L) and Cardanus (R).

But that’s not all we have this morning. The earthshine was very distinct, though capturing that required a different exposure entirely.

five-percent waning crescent moon showing morning earthshine and lightening skies
This is a one-second exposure at f6.3, ISO 800, which is long enough at this magnification to start to introduce motion blur, but just barely. Since the details lit by the light reflected from Earth (not where I was, but further east where it was daylight,) are still dim, bringing them out requires much long shutter speeds and the Earth still refuses to stop spinning, so there’s a limit, especially if you’re working without a tracking mount. And yes, I’ve talked about them before, but here’s the crucial bit: even if I had a tracking mount, it’d have to be precisely aligned to celestial north (Polaris, only not exactly,) and that would take a lot of fussing for a couple of shots to feature on the blog – I’d probably not bother anyway. But even with this, the details, especially the ray craters of Tycho, came out more than adequately.

You may notice a brighter spot at lower left, not too far from the terminator, and think that’s a little too bright, as I did. But no, that’s Aristarchus, a quite young crater at only 450 million years, so it’s naturally pretty bright – actually, the brightest thing on the moon. Were it actually lit by sunlight, the light would be so bright as to burn a hole in your retina, so it’s a good thing we’re only seeing it in relative darkness.

Okay, no.

In a couple of days, the moon will be down to a little over one percent illuminated right before sunrise, and will diminish down to about 0.8 percent by two PM – we’ll have to see if I make the attempt then, and what I get. Unless we have some specific conditions, it will likely be obscured just from sunlight scattered by the atmosphere but, well, time will tell…

It’s been… one week

Al Denelsbeck

I just love planting earworms like that.

ladybeetle Coccinellidae on unidentified yellow wildflowers against blue sky
But it really has been a week since the outing that I am about to relate, and the delay is partially due to a lack of free time, and partially due to wanting to clear some older photos from the blog folder first, which I did – there are six posts between now and this one, a photo from this same outing that I put up a day later. I suppose I always could back-date this post to make it look like I wrote it the same day, but why would I do that? Anyone coming here regularly knows I never posted on that date, so who would I be fooling?

[That’s just a hint, to someone who needs it.]

It was not the most productive of outings, especially since (as I said in the previous post) I was aiming to find mantids either mating or placing egg cases, which did not come to pass. So it was a ‘target of opportunity’ kind of session, and still produced a few interesting images.

American snout butterfly Libytheana carinenta apparently finding Buggato's hat interesting
Early on, a little butterfly settled onto Buggato’s hat for a light snack, I’m going to assume of the sweat-produced salt thereon since butterflies will do this more often than you might think. This is the appropriately named American snout (Libytheana carinenta,) not at all showing the color of the wings when they’re exposed. It got startled away and still returned, so we’ll credit Mr Bugg with a sweatshake that brings all the butterflies to the yard [no, I’m better than that.] At least I got both of them to hold still long enough for a sharp portrait.

After a while, I spotted an eentsy frog on a leaf, about the smallest that I’ve seen in ‘adult’ form while still a juvenile – I get the impression that the tadpole tail disappeared not two days ago, even though you can’t tell that from my image here.

very small juvenile Copes grey treefrog Hyla chrysoscelis showing camouflaging green back pattern
There is a hint of a white patch between the eye and the corner of the mouth, with a darkish band right behind it, which identifies this as a Copes grey treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis,) sporting the camouflaging green backs that can occur at this age. As small as it was, it was quick to seek cover as I leaned in for a better shot, but we encountered one or two others the same day, same general size, so I managed to sneak in some fingertips for scale as Buggato snapped the photo.

juvenile Copes grey treefrog Hyla chrysoscelis on greenbriar vine with fingertips in background for scale, by Al Bugg
By the way, I found the secret to getting Mr Bugg to forward me photos that he’s taken, which is to take some photos of him and hold them hostage until I receive the ‘ransom.’

On two occasions, we saw robber flies with prey. One allowed us to do some detailed portraits, because it was busy stuffing its yap.

robber fly genus Efferia, possibly Nerax with leaf-footed bug Coreinae
There are 110 species of robber fly (genus Efferia) in North America, but the Nerax group is most common in the southeast, so it seems – that’s as close as I’m getting. Its prey looks to be a leaf-footed bug (subfamily Coreinae,) but yeah, good luck with distinguishing any other details, or even determining that I’m wrong.

Robber flies are fairly large and ominous-looking, but they’re surprisingly mellow and will occasionally land on someone if they’re holding still; they’re also pretty chill about close approaches if you go slow. They’re wicked predators of other insects, but don’t bother people at all. Not sure what preys on them – they don’t seem overly concerned about such things.

Another section of our hike showed a sudden population of argiopes.

black and yellow argiope Argiope aurantia with prey, likely katydid
Black-and-yellow argiopes (Argiope aurantia) most commonly go under the name ‘garden spider,’ but that’s hardly exclusive. They’re big, and do big orb webs typically at about waist to chest height because they get off on hearing people freak out. In this small region, we spotted several within easy visual sight, and then none at all a handful of meters away while the conditions were about identical – I’m taking this as evidence that the hatchlings are lazy and won’t go far if the pickings seem adequate. And they were: the immediate surroundings were brimming with katydids, which is likely what’s all trussed up in the web.

Buggato did a photo of me getting the above photo, by the way.

author doing closeup of Argiope aurantia with macro rig, by Al Bugg
That’s the current macro rig in hand, and the spider is visible if you look closely. Not visible is the other nearby, almost in my armpit as I leaned over to get a perspective other than the underside of the spider. And yes, those are all the thorn vines of some kind of berry patch – there’s nothing too dangerous to prevent me from getting photos for the blog, I tells ya. I even got bitten by fire ants on this outing, which is not good news because they’re not normally in this area.

A little later on during the return leg, I was surveying a particular porcelain berry bush for more of the froglings when I glanced down right in front of me and found the only mantis of the entire outing (despite the fact that, in the late winter, we had found dozens of egg cases in the immediate area.)

adult Carolina mantis Stagmomantis carolina looking directly into camera
This is a Carolina mantis (Stagmomantis carolina,) likely a male from the coloration and body shape, but certainly a reproducing adult. It was not one from any of the egg cases that we saw, because those were all of Chinese mantises instead. And it patiently posed for a few portraits before deciding that we were not going to leave it be.

adult Carolina mantis Stagmomantis carolina, likely male, seen from back
They often have this ‘urban camouflage’ coloration, but also appear green-brown, and are not very big. But this is a good view of the wings, so we’re certainly in the stage of seeking a mate – just, not presently engaged, as it were.

Meanwhile, Buggato posed for a scale shot.

Al Bugg posed alongside adult Carolina mantis Stagmomantis carolina, likely male (the mantis I mean - Buggato is certainly male)
At that point, our time was about up and we were heading back to the car, but as always, keeping an eye open for any further photographic subjects. A spot of white on a leaf attracted my attention, and I bent close to examine it, confirming my suspicions that it was a cluster of eggs. Moreover, as I leaned in really close, I realized they were in the process of hatching, so back out came the macro rig.

green stink bug Chinavia hilaris eggs and new nymphs
It took uploading the images to BugGuide.net, but as always, I got my answer – more specific than I suspected I’d get, too. These are green stink bug nymphs (Chinavia hilaris,) though how the entomologists at BugGuide differentiated these, no one ever said. It was possibly due to my remarkably detailed extreme closeup, since I stabilized the leaf in question by entangling its supporting branch with another thorn vine, then had Buggato hold my flashlight for adequate focusing light as I went in with the reversed 28-105 lens, the homemade ‘super macro:‘

newborn green stink bug nymphs Chinavia hilaris on eggs
I can’t complain at all about the results, especially since these guys are less than 2mm in body length – a pair could probably share the head of a straight pin. As the final photo subject of the day, I considered it a win, and had I more time, I might have stuck around to try and get a sequence of other eggs hatching, but alas, someone had to be at work within the hour, so further fame and accomplishment had to be postponed for that. And then I get all this snark in return. There’s no justice.

The secret yet eludes me

Al Denelsbeck

Still working through the backlog of photos, but part of the reason for stalling on these was that I was trying to produce the next chapter in the story, even going so far as to make another examination tonight before I started working on this post, to no avail.

Carolina mantis Stagmomantis carolina pointing to location of dramatic event
You see, I’m trying to document the entire life cycle of a praying mantis, birth to death and everything in between, but a few parts tend to be difficult to capture. Birth, molting, even the occasional capture of prey – got all that. But with the exception of two or three inadequate frames from years ago, the courtship, mating, and egg-laying have all escaped my attention. In some cases, it appears that I’ve missed it happening very conveniently close by, like the egg case that was on the big Japanese maple right outside the front door, that I not only missed all winter long (even as I placed a case obtained elsewhere in prime position on the other side of the same tree,) I didn’t find it until well after hatching season.

egg case ootheca of Chinese mantis Tenodera sinensis
This tree, while dense, is as tall as my armpits and a little over two meters across, and frequently garners my attention – there’s no excuse for this.

It’s not like I’m not trying. I frequently do a round or two of the yard, checking out all of the favorite locations and all of the newly-discovered ones, trying to keep tabs on the various mantids to be found. Once they reach adulthood, they have wings and can pretty much go wherever they want, though I’m endeavoring to make this location ideal for them, by having lots of plants to attract their prey insects, and making sure they get plenty of water when I find them during hot spells – and they definitely seem to appreciate this bit.

juvenile Carolna mantis Stagmomantis carolina after misting
This used to be accomplished by a misting bottle, until I picked up a garden sprayer and could cover a lot more territory. During the hot dry season (which pretty much means Carolina summer,) I frequently stir them out of hiding places when I hose the mist around, as they come up to the upper reaches of leaves to collect as much moisture as possible before it evaporates.

Chinese mantis Tenodera sinensis pausing after misting
But gradually, the numbers dwindle until it seems I see none for days or even weeks. And yes, it’s possible that they leave because of all the attention, big looming softboxes and cameras getting shoved in their faces, but this doesn’t occur very often at all; it might seem like a lot, if you follow my posts, but it’s spread over many individuals, and I can observe the mantids as well as anyone else – they know how to make themselves scarce if they feel threatened. Most times they haven’t even left position when I finish my photo sessions and move on. I mean, anxious mantids don’t tend to stop and clean their feet.

adult Chinese mantis Tenodera sinensis cleaning its feet
This is one of the new, breeding adults, by the way, as indicated by the complete wings with that bright green band. This was a sudden reappearance on the tomato plants next to the Japanese maple that may have been its own hatching grounds, and I watched it for a few days, off and on, before it disappeared again. But while we’re here, we need a closer look at those details – why waste them if they were captured?

detail shot of previous frame
The dark eyes here denote that it was taken at night, when they’re typically more active, but this is very likely the same individual as a couple of pics above, the wet adult with the green-brown eyes – that’s just the day mode. The photos were only two days apart, back at the beginning of September, but I haven’t seen this one since.

Still, I keep trying, even doing an outing to the same spot in the late winter where literally dozens of egg cases had been found, hoping for the chance to spot one being laid/placed/produced/whatever by one of the thousands of mantises that should have been born that spring. The result? Not only no sign of such behavior, we saw one, count ’em, one mantis the entire four hours (and that one wasn’t even the same species as all the egg cases, but will be along shortly anyway.)

adult Chinese mantis Tenodera sinensis posing pleasantly
We’re closing on the end of the season now, so there’s not a lot of time remaining to catch this, at least for this year – I’ve been trying for over a decade, so it’s just one of those many background goals that I’ll take advantage of when the time is right. And if I ever figure out a magic formula to make them stick around and provide more chances for this, I’ll let you know.

While the last few photos have all been the larger Chinese mantises (Tenodera sinensis,) the same ones caught during hatching, I’ll close with a smaller, adult Carolina mantis (Stagmomantis carolina,) that appeared on The Girlfriend’s trumpet flower for a little while and provided several enigmatic poses during a short photo session; another is the opening image at top. Just not the action poses that I’m trying to add.

Carolina mantis Stagmomantis carolina posed on trumpet flower Brugmansia leaves

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