Okay, I have a bunch of photos I’ve been neglecting, so let’s get some of them out of the way first – there will be another post following this with the rest. Provided I don’t get even more in the interim…
I did make a trip down to one of the osprey nests, right around sunset because that would throw the best light on things, but only one osprey (Pandion haliaetus) made a brief visit, appearing to examine things in the nest before flying off and again and not returning until the light had dropped so low that I gave it up for the evening. It should be well past the time that the young would have hatched, but not quite time for them to be showing themselves above the nest rim, yet the adult also didn’t do any feeding. Not sure what to think at this point.
This was the nest that I have to observe from a busy bridge, and while there, I watched a pair of North American beavers (Castor canadensis) foraging in the drainage stream below.
This was well down below where the sun could reach and it was subsequently pretty low light down there, so what I have isn’t very good quality. But at least I snagged this one bringing a bunch of reeds back to the den, indicating pretty strongly that there are young-uns around. I lost sight of both of them as they passed under the bridge, but the behavior of the ripples gave a hint that they’d stopped soon afterward, and I suspect the den is in the bank under the bridge. I’ll have to keep an eye out, since it gets dark so much later now that they should be active before sunset.
I’d stopped by NC Botanical Garden at some point, finding it an enormously slow day, and so I include just one curiosity, a hitchhiker that was walking along my shoulder.
This is the scale shot, that gives a hint of the colors, but we can do better.
The little bugger took some convincing to get off my hand and someplace that I could use both hands to operate the camera. I was thinking that I’d need to submit the images to BugGuide.net, because I knew this was a nymph and thus not likely to maintain this coloration into adulthood, but searching under “blue assassin” turned up a match, that of Acanthocephala terminalis. Not actually an assassin bug, instead being a leaf-footed bug, but they’re not far removed from one another, and yes, the adults look almost nothing like this – certainly the deep metallic blue hue is gone. We can see that a little better in the inset:
We need more really bright and deep blue bugs. Maybe I’ll start selectively breeding some…
[I have to note that, as I was copying “Acanthocephala terminalis” for its multiple uses in the photo descriptions, spellcheck asked me if I meant, “phallocentric.” You’re reaching like a snickering ninth-grader, spellcheck.]
Back home on Walkabout Estates, I was looking for anoles on the oak-leaf hydrangea (Hydrangea quercifolia) and instead took a few moments to snag the European honeybees (Apis mellifera) that were visiting.
The Girlfriend was thinking that the flowers were more pink than they’d been last year, but I have photos from around this time that shows them to be largely the same. However, we need a closer look at that honeybee.
That’s… really pretty sharp for a handheld shot of an airborne bee with a manual focus lens, but I admit that a lot of luck was involved, since other frames did not look even remotely in focus – it’s why I often fire off a sequence of frames of such subjects. Digital images are easy to discard and don’t cost anything, unlike slides. But the slides would have had richer color…
Okay, that got rid of seven of them – another eight are coming.