Always with the drama

Carolina mantis Stagmomantis carolina on black night butterfly bush Buddleia davidii
As the Chinese mantises have been molting into final instar, which means reproducing adult phase, they have abandoned the plants with smaller leaves and hiding spots, relinquishing them to the smaller, later developing Carolina mantises (Stagmomantis carolina.) And of course, among the prime choices for these are the butterfly bushes (Buddleia davidii,) which produce plenty of pollinator-attracting flowers all summer long. The Black Knight variety, the biggest and healthiest in the yard, hosts two such mantids of slightly different size, which I photograph occasionally. They’re both small enough to hide among the leaves easily, and better camouflaged than the Chinese mantids, so spotting them is occasionally challenging – except when they perch against the blooms themselves.

Coming back from stalking the green herons at the nearby pond the other day, I stopped by the bush and was rewarded with the appearance of a skipper, a family of butterfly with distinctive ‘X’ wings – there are too many species alike in appearance to pin this one down, but this might be a fiery skipper (Hylephila phyleus) – or it might not.

possibly fiery skipper Hylephila phyleus on sparse blossoms of Black Night butterfly bush Buddleia davidii
I didn’t have the macro lens affixed and had no time to change much of anything, so I was shooting with the 18-135 on autofocus – not bad, but not ideal, and a little prone to focus wandering when you get circumstances such as… but let’s not get too far ahead.

Once the skipper switched from one of the bigger bloom clusters to this barely-adequate one, it attracted some attention, from someone that I’m sorry to say I missed entirely – until it appeared in the frame.

possibly fiery skipper Hylephila phyleus being stalked by Carolina mantis Stagmomantis carolina on butterfly bush Buddleia davidii
One of the Carolina mantises was making its move, and I watched with delighted anticipation, camera ready. Actually, I should say we watched, because The Girlfriend had joined me at this point and was witnessing it too.

possibly fiery skipper Hylephila phyleus being stalked by Carolina mantis Stagmomantis carolina on butterfly bush Buddleia davidii
Perhaps it knew that skippers don’t wait around long, perhaps it was inexperienced, perhaps it’s simply the manner of Carolina mantids, but this one was moving in surprisingly fast, since I’ve seen Chinese mantids stalk insects with glacial slowness. It was clear we didn’t have long to wait.

possibly fiery skipper Hylephila phyleus being stalked by Carolina mantis Stagmomantis carolina on butterfly bush Buddleia davidii
Unfortunately, even with the aperture at f8, the depth was short and my focusing point in the viewfinder was falling between the two, with no time to correct it – the strike was imminent. I just kept shooting, twitching the camera to try and get the best focus.

possibly fiery skipper Hylephila phyleus being stalked by Carolina mantis Stagmomantis carolina on butterfly bush Buddleia davidii
The distance separating them was now less than 20mm, and the skipper seemed to notice the mantis, because the wings changed position. We’d gone from a mantis stalking an oblivious butterfly to a race to see who would react the fastest.

Carolina mantis Stagmomantis carolina striking at already-departed skipper
It was the skipper, flitting away in a fraction of a second even as the mantis struck, leaving the frame entirely. The action pose here just seems to indicate that mantids are clumsy and slow – it would have been nice to at least have a blur from the butterfly in here, but no.

Carolina mantis Stagmomantis carolina pausing after missing strike at meal
And the mantis paused there for a few moments, allowing us to try and fill in its thought processes with what we imagine it must be feeling, even though the chances are great that it’s feeling nothing but a natural instinct to hold still in case the butterfly reappears – or even to hold still because that’s what they do most of the time anyway. Regret, frustration, even a resolve to learn from this and do better next time? Not likely. There is quite likely some emotion-analog going on in there, the kind of thing that makes arthropods pursue their survival, and while we may speculate that it’s rudimentary (because their brains are exceedingly simple and they really don’t need anything too sophisticated, so natural selection would steer away from anything less efficient,) there’s also no way we’re likely to really know, either. Meanwhile, I missed a capture sequence that I’ve been after for a while, and will continue to pursue. Maybe next time it’ll be video…

On this date 33

We’re cheating a little here, but I said to myself, Why upload images that are identical to ones already uploaded? Which I’ve said a few times in the past, digging through the blog media library, but in this case, I’m sending you to a page in the main site gallery, because this black racer was taken on this date in 2008.

We go a little fartsy for 2011, with a tiny jumping spider all alone in the big jungle, or at least on the grape vines on the fence.

unidentified jumping spider on grape vine
The flatulence continues the following year, with a single frame of a female ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) failing to hold still at the feeder.

female ruby-throated hummingbird Archilochus colubris showing motion blur at feeder
Granted, it was a pretty slow shutter speed at 1/8 second, so many subjects could blur in that time, and hummingbirds can move a lot in much shorter time spans – I’ve had one start to fly off from the sound of the mirror slapping up, and while I was seeing it perched when I tripped the shutter, what I captured was it leaning back with the wings raised. But yeah, I am still reminded of those tippy drinking bird toys from my youth with this image.

jagged ambush bug genus Phymata beginning to show color changeWe have to have a callback in here, because you’ve seen this jagged ambush bug (Phymata) two weeks ago, as it was two weeks younger – or at least, I think it’s the same one. It’s really hard to tell arthropods apart in the best of circumstances, and much harder when there are chances for multiple individuals and you don’t see them every day. For the same date, I have photos of one that is distinctly different in color, and if I recall correctly, much bigger, but then again, a couple of decent meals and a molt can produce drastic changes, so who knows? I’ve said it before, but if anyone knows a method of easily distinguishing individuals, especially without contact, let me know. Maybe some kind of laser DNA plotter or something…

The next year, we have an entry from two different categories at the same time: Reptiles/Amphibians and Arthropods.

juvenile green treefrog Hyla cinerea with unknown insect on head
In 2014, we’d moved to the new (current) place, and I found a nearby pond that had large patches of pickerel weed, which attracted its share of pollinators and treefrogs. I have been unable to identify the parasite that adorns this green treefrog (Hyla cinerea,) and it may not even be a parasite, but simply a midge that found a handy perch. The frog certainly doesn’t seem too concerned.

In 2015, we have possibly the smallest snail that I’ve ever photographed.

tiny unidentified snail on misty leaf
tiny unidentified snail on author's fingertipYes, that’s my own fingertip over there to the right. This one’s so cute (the snail I mean,) it seems like it should have its own children’s book or animated special. Now, it may be hard to imagine what kind of adventures a snail could get up to, but then again, the same might have been said about a freaking sponge, so…

And far be it from me to abandon a tactic too quickly, so for the final images, we’ll refer to this post from last year; all of the bird photos therein were taken on this date a mere year ago, while I was in New York. Which probably means I should polish off the last of the Pennsylvania Dutch Birch Beers that I purchased while up there…

Another alert

In the next couple of nights, the Perseids meteor shower is supposed to be peaking, and of course, I say this with a certain fatalism, because my personal history of meteor showers is pretty disappointing: one fantastic shower, when I was unable to capture anything on film, and then quite a few absolutely dead nights when I was more than adequately prepared to snag images of them. Still, nothing will be seen if we don’t try, right?

I figured the announcement needed some kind of image, but I don’t have any – not the kind of illustration I should, anyway. But then I remembered what I’d gotten last time around, a curiosity that I discovered entirely by accident. And so I edited together a small animated gif (pronounced, “SHON-reh”) that shows what I found. That includes a bonus!

animated gif of time exposures of night sky
So, these are four exposures of the southern sky, hoping a meteor would cross the frame, and almost full resolution at that, so ‘zoomed in’ quite a bit. Ignore the bright, stationary dots; those are sensor noise that I didn’t bother to edit out. All of the streaks running diagonally, upper left to lower right, are stars, streaked by the Earth’s rotation in the roughly-one-minute exposures. But the single streak running upper right to lower left is something else. I’d initially thought I captured a couple of very dim meteors (these are very small in the full frame,) mostly because to even see them, the frame has to be magnified significantly and thus I have to scroll around to see details, and never realized that they were close to the same positions. In preparing this animation, I found I had four in sequence, and thus we’re looking at some kind of satellite, one not moving very fast and not reflecting a lot of light; chances are it’s some old rocket booster, or even a bit of debris.

But then, as I was finalizing the animation, I found the other, a dim little dot moving vertically right smack in the center of the frame. It barely shows movement in the one-minute exposures, so it’s got a long orbit, and pretty much a polar one.

At some point I may attempt to pin down what these are, since I have the day and times, and a rough indication of direction, but for now, I’m trying to post this to alert my legion of readers to the Perseids shower, and this has already taken enough time to produce, so that little research project will wait a bit longer.

Shit. In previewing the post right before approving it, I found another – look at the purple dot at bottom left.

Motherhood

Well, there is a mother and babies involved, but in exactly what way, I cannot determine – no matter which, it’s definitely creepy to our human perspective.

Out the other night by the neighborhood pond with a headlamp, tracking down a calling frog, I found a black shape on the trunk of a tree that, on close inspection, turned out to be a very large spider.

six-spotted fishing spider Dolomedes triton on tree trunk with prey
It wasn’t until careful examination of the abdominal markings that I determined that this was a six-spotted fishing spider (Dolomedes triton,) since I’ve never seen one this dark – usually, they’re olive green to rust brown in color. And this wasn’t the biggest that I’ve seen either, though it was still impressive, probably about 30mm in body length. I didn’t have to look all that close to determine that it was working on a meal; details were lacking due to the advanced nature of the consumption, but it looked to be another fishing spider.

six-spotted fishing spider Dolomedes triton on tree trunk with prey
I did several angles, during which the spider twitched slightly but remained otherwise motionless, and I then pursued other subjects. Returning home and unloading the images revealed a few tiny details that prompted me to go back out and and do some more photos; right now, we’ll refer back to the first image and the details that I saw then, shown now in an inset.

inset of first images showing newborn spiders
To the lower right, at the base of the spider’s cephalothorax, can be seen another tiny spider, undoubtedly a newborn, while to the left, two more can be seen on the trunk (above and below the middle leg.)

Now, I know females of the wolf spider family will carry their newborns on their back, both as protection and to introduce them to captured meals; the mother will open up the exoskeleton of the prey to allow the young access to the juicy bits. I was not aware that fishing spiders did this, certainly never having seen any despite finding lots of fishing spiders, including a nursery of newborns. But I’m not an entomologist, or any kind of collije edumacated, so it’s possible that I was simply unaware of more species doing this. When I went back out, I was hoping to find evidence of the newborns actually feeding on the captured prey, trusting the flash unit to reveal more in the shadows than I could see myself while there. Nothing was forthcoming, but I did get some slightly better pics of the little one on her back.

six-spotted fishing spider Dolomedes triton with newborn spider on base of cephalothorax
The bebby also seemed aware of me as I leaned in close, and moved away from a direct line of sight. But now, as I provide another photo, I also provide a thought that occurred to me as I was looking at them.

six-spotted fishing spider Dolomedes triton with newborn on base of cephalothorax
It remains possible that the fishing spiders do not carry their young around nor lead them to meals, and that I misidentified the prey. You see, that’s an awful swollen abdomen for a mother fishing spider, more like one that’s about to lay eggs, so it doesn’t see to fit with a proud mother. The only details that I can see for sure on the prey are the legs, and wolf spider legs can look similar. So it’s possible that what we’re seeing here are the newborns that had been on a wolf spider’s back, until it fell prey to the fishing spider. Most dispersed, a few were hiding out on the trunk, and this little bebby got confused. I’ll let you think about that one.

Quick pic from not today

flash photo in late twilight of green heron Butorides virescens showing reflections from spiders' eyes
This one I came across again while sorting, and decided that I needed to feature it in a brief post. Back at the end of June, I was still (mostly unsuccessfully) stalking the green heron (Butorides virescens) brood around the neighborhood pond, and this one paused on the shoreline to do a little evening fishing. It was late twilight, thus very poor light, and I popped the on-camera flash just to see if I could capture anything, but the distance was too great for the cute little capacitors that are used for such things, and I have the Custom Functions set to push the shutter speed to 1/200 second with a flash*, which made things look a lot darker than they actually were. Nevertheless, I got an oblique reflection from the heron’s eye.

And something else. A lot of something elses. Revealed by the very narrow reflection angle between the flash head and the lens, I captured the eyes of numerous spiders in the immediate vicinity, which reflect, if anything, even better than birds’ eyes despite being a tiny fraction of the size. Yes, there are easily that many spiders around, especially this time of year at the pond’s edge; most of them are probably very young fishing spiders. We’ll have a better look a little later on.

* Canon’s E-TTL flash system will automatically try to balance the flash with an ambient exposure, to provide a more natural-looking image, but this means in low light you can easily have a motion-blurred frame from a very slow shutter speed, with a similarly exposed flash image overlaid, which is of no use to me at least, so I override that setting to use the flash as primary illumination. Which occasionally works as seen here.

Quick pick from today

snowberry clearwing Hemaris diffinis hovering at purpletop vervain Verbena bonariensis
Just a quick one, as I gather a little time to work on more detailed posts; I have a few coming up. On an outing today, we did one last pass through a small tended flower garden within Gold Park, and Mr Bugg spotted this snowberry clearwing (Hemaris diffinis.) I tracked it for a bit, knowing any sharp photos would be from an even mix of timing and luck, but selected this one to upload because of the blue sheen of the wing’s reflections.

After some poking around, I determined that the flowers are likely purpletop vervain (Verbena bonariensis,) but feel free to pop my bubble, crush my ego, and otherwise make me feel small. I’ll probably just ignore you anyway…

On this date 32

young white-tailed deer buck Odocoileus virginianus looking wary
I remarked a few weeks back that that particular day in my shooting history was pretty lightly populated, and this is the opposite; I shot a lot on August 5th over the years. This is among the first in the folders, a white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) buck, just starting to grow its annual antlers, looking at me warily as I leaned on the railing of my second-floor deck. Back then (this being 2007,) I lived bordering a large wooded section and was delighted to have visitors like this. Funny, we’re much more urban now, and we tend to see a lot more. It’s not like deer really thrive on the things that come with population, unlike raccoons and opossums, but they’re certainly enjoying the potted plants that we’ve kindly provided for them in our front yard.

[We have not provided anything for the deer at all, and are trying to convince said deer to leave the plants the hell alone, with mixed results.]

On to 2010.

juvenile Copes grey treefrog Hyla chrysoscelis perched on photographer's thumb
Same place, not long before I moved in with The Girlfriend, and I was also delighted to have achieved a resident Copes grey treefrog (Hyla chrysoscelis.) By resident, I mean, “within a flower pot,” which led to this charming pic. Again, reflections on changes, since I can usually find one roughly every other evening around here now, though as I said before, I was/am also happy that the greens are outnumbering the greys. And as I type this (early Tuesday morning, like a little after midnight,) Hurricane Isaias is rolling in, the sweltering temperatures have dropped a bit, the rain is near-constant, and the frogs are happier than shit. I should be doing video, but I have to be up early, um, later on today.

Chinese early in molting processIn 2015, I was out on this date doing a very long sequence of molting Chinese mantises (Tenodera sinensis) – as well as a cicada – but technically the series started the day before. I do recall that the night was very hot and humid, even this late/early (boy, the midnight date change makes my blog semantics annoying,) and I was sweating profusely despite sitting mostly unmoving on the ground alongside the various plants. But you really need to go to that link, because this is one of the best series that I’ve shot, and the detail is Too Cool.

I remarked therein that I regretted not capturing the very beginning of the process, for any of the subjects that presented themselves that night, and it took another three years to finally achieve that goal. The next goal – along these lines anyway – is to do a time-lapse animation of the process; video is pointless because it takes something like an hour for the molting to take place.

Later that day, by the way, came the bird photos found here – like I said, a productive day. But a year later in 2016, I was chasing rainbows. Well, no, I was actually standing still and letting the rainbows come to me, which sounds a lot less futile.

supernumerary rainbow over saturated
This is a supernumerary rainbow, rare but not hugely so – they’re just more subtle than this. It’s clearly altered, but only to increase saturation and contrast to make the perfectly natural effects more visible. I go into more detail in the original post.

Now, we have a twofer for 2016 and 2017, but as curiosities, because in the spreadsheet that I created to do these posts, I have the images listed by date, followed by the folders they reside within, and 2016 and 2017 were sequential in the Leaves/Plants/Trees folder, so these two images were ‘adjacent.’

rain on rose bush and balloon flower along decorative sweet potato leaves
So on the left, we have 2016’s photo of the rose bush showing the same rain that produced the rainbow above, while on the right, 2017’s shot of a balloon flower and decorative sweet potato vine in a planter alongside the front porch a year later, done mostly for the colors.

And finally, we come full-circle back to the Mammals folder for the second 2017 image, a shot that I thought I’d posted back then, but apparently not.

eastern cottontail Sylvilagus floridanus with growth on nose
The eastern cottontails (Sylvilagus floridanus) visit the yard sporadically each summer, often as adorable juveniles, and provide some viewing entertainment in the evenings right around sundown. This particular one was sporting some growth on its nose, but don’t ask me what, because I’ve never seen anything quite like it – I can’t tell you if it’s simply scar tissue from some odd injury, or a genetic anomaly, or a malignant tumor. If they visited more often, I might have been able to at least see how this one seemed to be getting on, but I recall that we only saw it once after that. Sounds ominous, but the whole area is prime real estate to the rabbits and they freely roam around the neighborhood, so this one might simply have frequented other yards.

But yeah, August 5th has historically proven to be a good day for shooting; as I said, I’m typing this on the 4th, so I don’t know yet if this year will continue the trend. We’ll just have to see what else comes up in the next posts.

[This is how I get lots more page hits, as readers excitedly keep checking back. Drives me right to the top of search engines and ratings, let me tell you.]

Two quick greens

It’s 14 minutes to tomorrow, and I haven’t posted anything for a few days, so a couple of quick ones to sneak in under the wire. Oldest first.

green heron Butorides virescens being shy at dusk
On the same say that we were stalking the juvenile yellow-crowned night heron, I spotted a green heron (the ostensible target of the evening, before I found the other,) and snagged only a quick peek through the branches. But I got the eye at least.

And the other night, while I was talking to a friend on the phone, I found this green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) and did a quick portrait in a dynamic pose, with the streetlight creating a faint halo. This was intentional, and to that end I shot wide open at f4, but the focus was a wee bit off. I am ashamed, but it’s barely noticeable at blog resolution, so if I stick to only showing things off here, I’m good.

green treefrog Hyla cinerea with halo
But hey, deadline met.

Now July me down to sleep

Wow, even I don’t like that one!

But you’re not here for the wordplay, you’re here for the month-end abstract. So let’s see, what do we have for the contestants?

Coopers hawk Accipiter cooperii not holding still for the camera
While chasing the brood of Cooper’s hawks (Accipiter cooperii) that occupied Walkabout Estates, I snagged this motion-blurred example – image stabilizing lenses only work for the camera’s motion, not the subject’s. Had it not been for that head, it would have been a lot more difficult to determine what this even was.

I must note, by the way, that after making that post, I heard the young calling in the distance for a day or two, then nothing at all; they’ve left the area now, off on their own, so I’m glad I got what I did. This is contrasted against the red-shouldered hawks a few years back, who left the nest and vanished entirely – different species, different fledging habits.

And another, more abstracty.

fine orb web catching morning light edge on
This one does much better at higher resolution, and may become a large print that makes people go in close, because the web strands stay sharp – at least, within the focus range in the center. There are just enough details to make it work, for me anyway: the sparkle of the light off the strands, the parachute-like billow in the middle, the clarity of the web structure at lower left, and the curves of the highlights at lower center. It also helped that I was shooting with a wide open aperture, so the background got rendered in soft round blobs instead of aperture-shapes like pentagons or septagons. Little things, little things…

On this date 31

juvenile eastern fence lizard Sceloporus undulatus on tree
This week, we start off back in 2010, with a juvenile eastern fence lizard (Sceloporus undulatus,) quite small yet still a couple of times larger than the subject from a few days ago. It looks like it was taken at night, but fence lizards aren’t really active at night; this was taken at 3:45 PM, and is instead the effect of a small aperture and relying on the flash as the main light source. The ambient light wasn’t enough to expose into the shadows at those settings, so we have this high-contrast rendering, obviously taken before I had worked out a decent softbox arrangement. Things changed later on.

jagged ambush bug genus Phymata nymph on dog fennel Eupatorium capillifolium
Another taken in the afternoon, and if anything, the lens used would have let in even less light, but by this point (2013) I had the first of my successful softboxes. This is a jagged ambush bug (genus Phymata,) hanging out on one of the dog fennel plants, which had their own history. Earlier in the year, or perhaps the previous, I had planted seeds for several species of wildflower, specifically to encourage photo subjects, and this was one of the plants that came up; by the time that I realized it was a weed, it was getting quite tall and already proving popular with numerous species of arthropods, so it remained, for multiple years, and gave me plenty of photo opportunities. This ambush bug was just one of them, so small that it looked like a stray flower petal unless one looked very close, but their appearance is cool enough that a close look is warranted.

By the way, I’ve had dog fennel come up in the yard here for a couple of years now, and it hasn’t proven anywhere near as inviting to the insects this time, not sure why.

Imperial moth Eacles imperialis close up of head
This one is slightly disturbing, not because of its appearance of course, but in that I recalled this as having been taken last year, maybe the year before, but it was actually taken five years ago – I’m going to consider this a fluke and not an indication that my memory is going to hell. I include it here because, late yesterday as I type this, I heard a clattering at the office window and opening the blinds to find another one of these, which is an imperial moth (Eacles imperialis,) and they’re massive, nearly covering your entire hand. I’m fairly certain that it wasn’t the same one though, because they don’t even have mouths or probosci or any way to eat as adults – all they do is breed at this stage, and that lasts only a few days.

And another from the same year, because I have to.

unidentified grasshopper nymph in extreme closeup.
I’m not going to try to identify this grasshopper, which might even be a katydid species instead, because I didn’t get enough full anatomy shots and it’s likely an earlier instar anyway. We just needed this here for the detail, especially the eye facets, but the translucent quality of the chitin was a factor too. And one more thing, which is the rectangular reflection of the light source in the eye. I had thought I was further ahead in the folders, but saw this detail and realized it looked like the flash and softbox that had failed several years ago, and thus rechecked the dates; that’s what caught me about the moth above, because they were taken on the same date. It’s slightly amusing that I can tell what ‘era’ a photo is from by the evidence of the equipment used.

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