One of those items on my mental list of images to capture is the emergence of newborn mantises from their egg sac. I’ve gotten recently hatched nymphs a couple of times, but none ever emerging.
On spotting an egg sac near the pond in the park close by a few days ago, I found dangling debris, the shredded structure of the sac, that indicates the hatching has already occurred.
Edit: I’d already used “part eight” on a previous post and missed it, so this has been renamed.
I have a small collection of school presentations that I’ve put together, primarily about arthropods – life cycles, feeding habits, camouflage, and so on. For one of them, I have pretty much everything about lady beetles illustrated, save for just one thing:
The Girlfriend pointed this out to me, since this one had slipped past my radar, but two recent pics illustrated a trait I had mentioned long ago, in the early days of the blog, back when my readers numbered, well, pretty much as they do now (we won’t talk about those numbers.)
“Middle of nowhere.” This is one of those phrases that have gradually gotten more annoying to me over time, and I realize now that it subtly says a lot about our society, and perhaps even influences our reactions.
The middle of nowhere tells us that it’s far from roads, and restaurants, and telephones, and people overall – this is, supposedly, the “nowhere”
If you’re the least bit familiar with frogs and toads, you know that anything but the most cautious approach to any pond where they hang out will send them sailing off the bank into the cover of the water, or vanish beneath the surface if they’re in the water in the first place. This, however, is a set of rules that does not apply to mating season.
On approaching the little drainage pond
Here, we’re still wondering if spring has finally decided to settle in, or if its meds are going to wear off and send it scurrying for safety someplace, wherever spring goes when it’s not around – my guess is a shop that does specialty jams. The past few days have been spent dealing with the peripheral effects of a minor surgery – not mine, but that of The Girlfriend’s
When I was putting together the calendar and trying to include all dates that would be of interest to nature & wildlife photographers, and I had the chance to reflect on the event dates that had been chosen. For instance, National Pollinator Week falls in June. Now, pollinators can
I had toyed around with a couple of ideas for a spring equinox post, but haven’t gotten to any of them – perhaps later (I still have an hour!) But here’s something I just spent some time doing this evening, so I’ll remind you to do it too: clean your lenses!
Hopefully, you’re doing it routinely anyway, but this is my scolding reminder to do a spring cleaning. And since
“Hello?”
“Hey, Al, whatcha up to this afternoon?”
“Uhh, wrangling spiders.”
Long pause. “Wrangling…”
“Spiders, yes.”
Another pause. “Is this difficult?”
A shrug [yes, I shrug and gesture while on the phone.] “It’s frustrating at times, but a skill set like everything else.”
“Probably not like everything
Nature photography is still a bit slow yet and the weather’s been going back and forth, so I’m just tossing out this curiosity from last year.
Seen here is a vain fruit fly, Drosophila genus, on the bathroom mirror. I’ve definitely done sharper, better shots, but this one has a distinctive property. You’ll notice that there is one view from the back, and three from
