Just a few photos from the nearby pond, mostly recent, without a lot of exposition to go along.
An unidentified orthopteran, what I suspect is a meadow katydid, poses atop a button bush that’s showing the impact of the lateness of the season and the sparse rain in the past. In the thin line of undergrowth bordering the pond right below it, I was spotting various mantids and
I mentioned in the previous post that I made a pooter, which I’d needed for a while, but there was a specific motivation for it. A few days ago I had found another magnolia green jumping spider (Lyssomanes viridis) and I was frustrating myself trying to accomplish something that’s been on my mind since the first time around.
Magnolia greens are the only species I’ve found that allows
After attempting a couple of other techniques that weren’t working so well, I finally broke down and did it: I made myself a pooter.
If you are not familiar with entomology, you may have a variety of responses to this statement, including, “Congratulations – Al is a big boy now!” and, “Isn’t that a slang term for female genitalia?” But no, that’s
I came across this one while sorting images, and decided to put it up large, mostly because the dragonfly and the berries all fell so well into the same plane of focus and thus had sharp details.
I just tried for half an hour to identify those berries, with no luck, but the dragonfly is a blue dasher (Pachydiplax longipennis.) However, it wasn’t until I was just about
The mantis from the previous post stayed trapped by the rain for several days, finally leaving its position early this afternoon – naturally while I wasn’t watching. While I was wandering around the backyard, hoping to find where she’d gotten off to, I spotted something else, which I won’t identify and simply let you look at the image to the left to try and find on your own.
Just a quick one here. I discovered this little lady Thursday night, after the rains had started, sitting up under the overhang of the porch endeavoring to remain dry. The rain continued all day Friday and she stayed in place the way the ground slopes down in the back yard, she was close to three meters over my head, so I had little choice in shooting angles and
Still involved in many other things right now, so here are a handful of images from the recent past that just never got into blog posts, for one reason or another – some of which may become obvious.
First off we have the most recent images from just a few days ago, an unidentified Hemipteran nymph, quite a small one. I am inclined to call it an assassin bug, but so far I have found no species
Not too long after the various Chinese mantids around the yard molted into adulthood, they dispersed in various directions. I actually watched the rose bush resident fly off one evening, quite possibly to be immediately snagged by a bat – I saw something happen out of the corner of
Once again, I observe that the posts are thin, which is a shame because I am/was well on the way to a record in number of posts, having already passed the total for both 2014 and 2012 (not combined, mind you.) A lot of that had to do with Monday color, which I’ll leave it up to you whether that should be considered cheating or not. But at best, they added five photos per month to the number
So, right outside the same porch mentioned in the previous post has been a pair of large orb webs occupied by barn spiders (Araneus cavaticus), both females – it was only one for a few days, then another moved in. And curiously, their webs were almost stacked while the centers
