Who needs one, am I right? No need to get all hoity-toity with this – it’s a blog.
Which means I’m cleaning out a handful of images that have been piling up in the blog folder, unable to be attached to any theme.
Out one night and tracking a nearby ratcheting sound, I happened across this guy and got some nice poses, largely to try and invoke an identification since I’d never heard any of the chorus frogs make sounds like that before. There was a good reason for this: I was hearing the katydid not too far away, and not this one, which is only a spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer.) But the pose is nice, waiting for the security guards to pass before it slips in and steals the Blementibloop Emerald from under their noses.
At this time of year, working late in Deep 13 (my basement office, AKA Walkabout Studios,) I often hear small thumps from the windows, which is always (so far anyway) some variation of this guy:
Attracted by the insects that are attracted by the light, several different species of amphibians, in this case a southern toad (Anaxyrus terrestris,) will thump against the glass in their pursuits, or just take the opportunity to turn the tables and spy on me. Naturally, I couldn’t let one standing on its hind legs pass. But don’t be giving me any flack about that window; it’s an old house with appropriately-aged sashes, and these sit right smack at ground level under the roof peak end that doesn’t have gutters. They’ve been cleaned – it gets right back this way with the next rain. They’ll be replaced with modern vinyl units eventually. Just shut up.
In fact, here:
I caught this juvenile green treefrog (Dryophytes cinereus) peeking over top of a paver, and it flipped me the toe, and so I pass this on to you.
Out at night with the headlamp, I often get reflections coming back to me because of the minimal separation between the light source and my eyes, which tells me where to look closer. The flash unit on the camera has a greater separation though, so I can rarely reproduce the effect – I would have liked to have for these at least.
What I saw was one bright reflection, with numerous tiny little sparkly reflections above it, making me think I’d found Tinkerbell. No, I knew right away what it was, and thus got closer to this wolf spider for a slightly better view.
The bright reflection came from mama’s eyes, while all the little sparklies came from the eyes of the young on her back – I really do need to figure out how to capture this quickly, because it’s a cool effect. Provided, of course, you can deal with spiders. This one was about average for a wolf spider, legs spanning roughly the size of a quarter.
Then there was this (same night, actually):
I usually see some variation of this, but not quite like this one. Let’s go in closer:
Far enough away that the flash reproduced the reflections faithfully, but just close enough to get some of the surrounding detail, we can see now that it’s a pair of North American raccoons (Procyon lotor) and the secondary reflections from the water’s surface. I had a better initial view, since I was seeing over top of that intervening branch, but the camera sits just a few centimeters lower, enough to block portions of the reflections. I realized this and was moving forward to correct it, but as typical from the species, the raccoons did not maintain eye contact but were quickly moving off. We have cats that visit the property from time to time, and it becomes fairly easy to tell them apart just from the reflections, or behavior thereof. Cats will continue to stare in your direction, trying to determine what’s happening, but raccoons don’t wait around; they’ll look into the light for just a few moments, they turn away and start to move off. Occasionally, you’ll get a new appearance some distance away as they check to see if you’re advancing, often from up a tree trunk a little ways, but again, never for more than a second or two.
Old one here:
This one dated from back in March, and I think I’d already had too many Carolina anoles (Anolis carolinensis) posted then, so it sat here. Obviously not too early in the year, since the Japanese maples were leafing out well. Curiously, the anoles seemed to have abandoned the Japanese maples entirely, not running around on them by day, not sleeping on them by night. Not sure why. They’re still quite active on the deck, though. Quite active.
Language is fun. While the italics might have carried the emphasis and meaning pretty decently, it’s not hard to say that two-word sentence out loud, in a certain way, and immediately make someone think it’s dirty. Very similar to the way that line from Raiders of the Lost Ark was delivered: “Top. Men.” And now I’ve introduced an entirely different meaning in your head and it will never leave – unless it was already there before.
Anyway, I was out on the deck doing copy photos for prints I had neither the negatives nor the digital files for, and these two were cavorting openly. Or canoodling. Cabaling? I best leave it here…
Some flowers to clean our mental palate (unless you think like that about flowers.) Two from earlier spring in April, two recent.
We had/have a good crop of hairy-stem spiderwort (Tradescantia hirsuticaulis) in the back yard, the one that we don’t mow, and we’re kind of glad we don’t because critters have now been coming into the yard to partake of these – you’ll see more video clips eventually. I was just playing around with the depth and color here.
Meanwhile, the azaleas were also in bloom, so I did a quick composition in contrast:
Even with the help of the white stripe, this treefrog wasn’t camouflaging against the blooms very well. It obviously wasn’t too hot of a day, or it would have been tucked in someplace darker and cooler.
Nearby, but just a few days ago now:
Funny, only a couple of days after this, the flowers were bursting forth in brilliant purple, but I don’t feel like going out there just to reshoot this. But butterfly bush (Buddleja davidii) flowers grow in distinctive conical spikes on the end of their branches, all clustered together, except this year this particular plant has some of them throwing out separate clusters further down the stem – mostly on the center stalks, too. Not sure what this means, but I can’t think ‘disease,’ since this bush is the biggest and thickest since we got it years ago.
And finally,
Last year we got three different salvia plants, in three colors: blue, red, and purple. The red somehow didn’t make it through the winter, but the purple and blue are both growing enthusiastically, the purple just now throwing out buds. The blue has been blooming heartily though, and I took a moment after a rain to do a few shots of it, mostly for the record, but a tight crop n one portion with the raindrops worked well – getting fartsy again. The brighter leaves in the background set off the stamens well too.
Well, that’s thirteen pics out of the folders, so I’ve done my job and cleaned things up a tiny bit – there are still plenty more in there, some quite old and probably need to be deleted. Still made a post of it though.