Just three four last photos before I close out the first half of the year, and start all of the associated maintenance.
In doing my routine patrol of the front forty of Walkabout Estates today, I was musing to myself that I hadn’t seen any Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinenesis) up there for a while, like several days; there are at least two, in two different locales. Not troubling, but curious.
That was all it took, apparently.
This is the closest one, generally hanging out on or around the Japanese maple that sits close to the front door; in this case it’s on the sweet potato vines in the planter that’s immediately adjacent to the tree, flanking the front steps, which also holds (as you can see) some pansies. While cautious about my presence, the lizard nevertheless gave me a couple of poses as I endeavored to get the flower in there.
A little later on, while engaged in the ongoing Japanese beetle slaughter that marks summer around here, I found the other one, or at least an other one, on the front oak-leaf hydrangea. This one sat up high and retained its position as I scooped a handful of beetles off of lower branches into the soapy water.
Both were patient enough to allow me to go inside and grab the camera, since I did not have it in hand on either occasion – my hands were full with beetle patrol. [A little tip: Japanese beetles typically just drop off of their perch when danger threatens, counting on either taking flight as they fall or simply disappearing into the undergrowth. Fill a bowl with water and a little dish soap and hold it underneath, then tap the branches above or near the beetles, and they’ll usually fall right into the bowl. The soap breaks down the surface tension of water, preventing it from being repelled by the beetles’ chitin, and they’ll drown – without it, they may escape. And while you might question the efforts to slaughter insects by a nature photographer, this particular species is invasive, has few predators in this area, and can do a lot of damage.]
Back to the anoles. Suspicious of my switching vantage, this one started slipping down the layers of leaves, but in doing so came in my direction, so I got a few more frames.
This is not just an expressive pose, but it is the first distinctive evidence that I’ve gotten that shows that anoles, like chameleons, can aim their eyes in two different directions as once; I’d often wondered, but the chances of seeing this are always slim, unless I somehow got one to pose in front of a mirror. There’s no reason why they couldn’t move their eyes independently, since binocular vision isn’t too necessary for them, but I’d never been sure until now. By the way, I cropped this image to include the entire tail, and so have to draw your attention to it.
One more, totally unrelated, but I’m not making an entire post over just this:
This little guy has had a web stretched between two potted plants on the back deck for a while, and I initially took it to be an orchard orbweaver because I couldn’t see the back of the abdomen clearly, but later determined that it’s a basilica orbweaver (Mecynogea lemniscata) – I’ve only seen them once before, but certainly recognize the pattern. And while they call it an orbweaver, which typically means a wheel-shaped web, this is more of a sheet web, and you can see that there are multiple layers to it with some curious strand patterns. On moving the plants earlier, I reduced the space between them to almost nothing, collapsing this web, and then returned them to position and the web sprung right back into its shape, the spider only twitching in preparation of fleeing. Good engineering.
Last night I had finished photo sorting over 1,500 images and run the internal backups, and then today I added another couple dozen photos so, do it again – it shouldn’t take too long this time. Though there’s also the post draft purge of the blog database, and e-mail purging, and some month-end maintenance, so I’ll be busy for a couple of hours – but at least I got one last post out for June.