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
Category: Nature
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
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.
It wasn’t
Quick pic from not today
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
Quick pick from today
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,
On this date 32
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
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.
On the same say that we were stalking the juvenile yellow-crowned night heron, I spotted a green heron (the ostensible
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?
While chasing the brood of Cooper’s hawks (Accipiter cooperii)
On this date 31
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
A break
I was busy writing the ‘On this date’ post for this week, early this morning, when an app on my phone alerted me to lightning activity in the area. It’s been doing this for the past couple of weeks, due to the weather conditions, and it’s either been too far away to be worth pursuing, or late afternoon when lightning photography is not worth attempting. The one exception