Because you know we’ll be back to the arthropods soon enough…
All of these, by the way, came from the NC Botanical Gardens, just not on the same day. There are reptiles and amphibians to be found elsewhere of course, but the conditions in the gardens are pretty welcoming to them, and they have enough human contact to be less shy than normal.
On a fence where they’re
While I have a ridiculous number of images to sort through, mostly due to the hawks (I fire off a lot of frames to try and capture specifics of behavior as well as ‘something cute’) and I am behind on posting several photos of interest, this one jumped ahead of the stack for no good reason. I know, if I had to do this I could have gone with something much more appealing, but
There are quite a few photos that I’m trying to get around to posting, some of which I might simply throw out here with little explanation – I know, shocking, right? Right now, however, I’m going to post a brief update on the red-shouldered family.
Previously I mentioned that I had never seen the hawks bringing in what was reputed to be their preferred food, which is/are frogs.
… or something like that. I’ve lost track anymore.
But this is from today, and it’s colorful, so it fits. And it probably goes without saying, but those flowers are pretty small, maybe a little over a centimeter wide, so the fly is eentsy. Not as eentsy as this, but still insignificant. Except to its mother, I’m sure.
Monday I observed (and posted about) the newborn Chinese mantises (Tenodera sinensis,) while wondering if the all of the viable eggs had hatched – I’ve seen cases produce multiple ‘broods,’ for want of a better word. I was up late Monday night, so didn’t get out as early as I should have Tuesday morning. Nature has a way of making one regret such actions
I mentioned earlier, I believe, that I had a few mantis egg sacs that I was watching to see if they’d hatch, the intention being (of course) to photograph their emergence in better detail than before. One of the sacs was in the front garden where most of my mantis images from the past two years have been
You’ll probably have to look closely at this one for a moment to realize what you’re seeing.
On the back porch early this evening, I spotted a black ant ambling along with what appeared to be captured prey, as ants are prone to doing. A closer look changed that impression, and made me run get the camera for a quick photo session. Apparently, a contentious encounter between
Several weeks back, I was contacted out of the blue (rather than out of the yellow or the aubergine, which are much less abrupt) by Catherine Scott, a biologist/entomologist that specializes in spiders she had seen some of my images on BugGuide.net and wanted permission to use them in a post on her own blog, SpiderBytes. After a lengthy and heated discussion on terms (me:
I told you yesterday that I’d reveal the secret tomorrow, meaning today, and it’s still May 1st as this posts…
What you saw in the last month-end abstract was simply a dragonfly, one that was doing a good job of hovering in one spot, and so I snagged a photo of it in midair. At 1/50 second shutter speed, the wings blurred, and with the sun behind it, the reflections from the wing
For this month’s end abstract we have… something. I’ll let you try to figure out what. I’ll be back tomorrow to eradicate the mystery, should it still exist. All I will tell you now is that there is nothing at all tricky about it, no editing, no special techniques, just a grab shot yesterday.
