Earth 2: Earth Harder


So, I did indeed brave the sunny, warm weather (which did not tax my sinuses half as much as yesterday) to chase a few shots, mostly by heading down to the river for a short while. I was primarily aiming to do some infra-red experiments, and did, but I took advantage of other conditions while I was there. Above, a common clearwing moth, also called a hummingbird moth (Hemaris read more

Don’t mess with a nature photographer

Just had to post this.

I came in this evening from being outside shirtless, horrifying the neighbors, and felt something walking on my chest. Looked down and found a little winged aphid – just the perfect size, to my way of thinking. Grasping it by the wings and scampering outside, I carefully placed it on the azalea bush in front of one of the newborn mantises. This was touchy – they’re read more

Pizza boy

This is probably the best photo I’m ever going to get of this, so I have to share. This is what spider sex looks like.


The female is the larger one, which is very typical of spiders. The little ‘legs’ seen here extending out to the front are pedipalps, and one of the ways you can easily (well, more or less) tell the gender of a spider, because the male’s are read more

Bugfest

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. read more

Frustrations, part nine

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: read more

Middle of nowhere


“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” read more

Great horny toads!

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 read more

Still trying

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 read more

Bipolar season

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 read more

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