Threatening migraine. Blown water heater. Video that needs to be reshot. Lengthy posts not happening. So have a frame from this morning.
Yes, I actually had the camera in hand while talking to plumbers, but I wasn’t actively shooting. I mean, there’s a limit…
Returning from this past trip, I noticed that one of the Chinese mantises (Tenodera sinensis) was now perched on the balloon flowers within easy reach of the cat mint, which is notorious for attracting pollinators by the boatload, and thus was almost twice the size as when I’d last seen one due to this proximity to effortless meals.
I realize that this doesn’t show scale at all, which I did think about while shooting but had no simple solution to. Roughly, pushing the 6cm mark, so noticeably approaching adult size now though still a little ways off – call it a teenager. It likely thought that it was shielded from good view by that leaf overhead, and my initial shots had it in shadow, but I know how to maneuver a flash unit.
This image is cropped a little, about 3/4 of the full frame, but now we’re gonna go in closer for the details, because I’m Al Denelsbeck, and this is Walkabout.
The eye facets are of course a nice touch, but what I’m showing here is the coloration, since this was taken at dusk last night and the eyes were in transition between the striped green daylight appearance and the pure glossy block nighttime fashion. The camouflage isn’t necessary at night, and the lack of pigmentation boosts their vision. Or so I’m told.
Nearby on the old man Japanese maple (the one that came with the house,) another mantis showed almost the same growth spurt and was slightly more cooperative in posing.
I said slightly – I could have done without that leaf cutting across the forehead, but this was considerably better than my initial perspective. Once you commit to doing macro work in the field (or the front yard, as it were,) you will get into some peculiar and hard-to-maintain positions, and ones without cute little yoga names, too.
… or something.
I’m back from my escape room adventures, which have been greatly exaggerated, but that’s what you’d expect from someone who blew the post title twice (should have been Profiles of Nature, and we’re only up to 28.) Good thing I haven’t paid him…
Anyway, it was another trip, and I’ll provide a photo to let you guess where this time. Really, it’s been far too much time on the road lately, but so it goes. Your clue:
Believe me, I had plenty to post before this trip, so I’ve got content for a while. I just have to get to it. Stay, as they used to say in the earlier days of radio frequency broadcasting, tuned.
Note:
Rumor has it that the person who usually does these profiles is currently on hour 14 of a 1 hour escape room. He is shouting through the door to the now empty lobby that “I’ve almost got it!” And “NO HINTS!”. That person should be back for the next Profile in Nature. It has fallen to me to perform this task. You’d think that I would know something about nature – or at least have a decent profile, but no – “nature” is that really big room on the other side of my front door, and my head is shaped like a forgotten potato in the back pantry.
This is a bird. He is a big bird, (not that Big Bird, but he did audition for the part.) a big, brown bird sitting on a wood thingy, who can’t believe you barged right into the bathroom while he was trying to figure out the bidet. Either that or Martha brought up the whole “Where is the missing egg?” issue again. How was he supposed to keep track of all three while the game was on? You know what? Martha can go jump off a lake! These are very sharp foot thingys and this hard mouth part can cut through molten steel when angered, so she better just stop bringing that up. This bird has a wingspan, and could fly, but like so many today, they are all waiting longer to get their licenses. It’s a generational thing, who has time for flying anyway? Blame it on social media, everyone else does. He did not realize that flying was even an option until late in life. The problem started with coddling parents (who did okay giving him roots but forgot about the other half of that quote), then there was the whole Erica Jong-thing, and finally, as a young adult, he was too embarrassed to attend flight school with the other hatchlings. (By the way, that’s why he initially contact the Children’s Television Network about a role where he could keep his feet on the ground at all times.) Finally, he left the nest and started hanging with the cool birds who knew how to fly, but couldn’t be bothered. That’s where he met Martha. Lately, he starting getting into preening, but he watched a David Attenborough documentary on peacocks, so that idea bit the ghost. The most discouraging revelation, thanks to Martha, was that he didn’t have to be a chicken to be hen-pecked. “What? No, we had plenty of Pringles, nobody ate the egg!” He doesn’t have a lot to look forward to, but sometimes, that’s the way the ball crumbles.
If you join us next week, hopefully the person who usually does this will be back, but if not, you will be introduced to a bug.
I have a ton of bird photos from the New York leg of the trip to feature, so this seemed to be the best way to break them up; unfortunately, the remaining ones may be a little while in coming, since some obligations are coming up. Right here, we have an osprey (Pandion haliaetus, but you already knew that,) hanging out in a dead tree near the Gatsby mansion as the sky turned foreboding. This is very likely the same one seen wheeling overhead in the storm video, which was taken… well, I don’t know how much later it was taken, because video clips do not have EXIF data and the file tags are all over the place, but none of them are accurate. We’ll just say less than 20 minutes later almost directly underneath this perch.
Like the bald eagles around here at Jordan Lake, the osprey have exploded around Cayuga Lake, at least, partially due to supporting efforts in the area: there are scores of manmade nesting platforms all throughout the region, which I regret not stopping to do a few pics of – most of the time I was on my way someplace when I passed, not able to stop, but laziness plays a role too. I mean, I’d been shooting an active nest with young from a great vantage before I arrived in NY, so my lower angle looking up at nest edges wasn’t comparing, you know?
While touring Montezuma National Wildlife Refuge at one point, an osprey started fishing in a small channel just off the drive, practically hovering in the headwind and providing a very consistent view as I leaned out the window.
No, that’s not enough – let’s go in closer for the details.
This is a full-resolution crop of the same frame, lightened just slightly to show the eye better, but I want to draw your attention to the color cast of the underside, since that green hue came from the reflection of the marsh grasses alongside the channel. Bear in mind that the bird was 20 meters up, maybe slightly less, but the grasses were extensive and vibrant enough to act as fill lighting in this manner. Cool.
That one never did spot a fish in the brief session nearby, while another one cruised through slowly – again, heading into the wind so it took its time in passing. I snagged a few frames of that one too, including one as it turned to look directly at me.
Varying distance and a little difficulty in pinning down the details sharply enough meant I was trusting autofocus, which was slightly off for this frame – of course. There was nothing else to focus on, but it still seems to twitch a little too much, though the jiggling of the lens and the image stabilizing effects might contribute too. Ah well – better than I was ever getting with the old Sigma 170-500.
As I made my way along, the drive took a sharp bend, and eventually I could look back on a tree that had been ahead of me, finding one of the ospreys (perhaps) had taken a perch and was attempting to be regal, so I did a wide variety of frames for the fartistic, semi-abstract approach.
Subjects like this are the kind that I recommend working the hell out of, since it can be presented in countless ways depending on framing and focal length. In fact, I just went back now to look closer at the originals, because it seemed like the bird’s body was aligning with the branch extremely well, but it turns out that the bird is actually behind the branch underneath – technically, further out on the same branch, but falling behind it from our perspective here; other frames show the tailfeathers peeking out from beneath.
And then, we go in closer for the eye contact.
Obviously, it realized I was shooting, and provided this wholly unconvincing grin – ospreys aren’t known for being naturals in front of the camera.
Okay, fine, ospreys cannot grin at all – it’s just a trick of the angle. Happy now? But note the change in background color. The sky was uniformly clear but slightly hazy, and the color change comes solely from the change in shooting angle, this being almost into the sun. Good to pay attention to for the best effect in your scenics.
And now we’ll return to one I teased about, oh, many days ago now.
Out early in the morning at the mansion, I was wandering the lake edge and looking for subjects, knowing there were bald eagles in the area but seeing nothing save a woodpecker. And then, I heard the soft, brief calls of an eagle, almost idle, and very close by – like, within one of the trees on the property. I started a slow stalk of the area, pausing frequently to peer hard into the trees, trying to remain inconspicuous even though I knew I was close enough for easy spotting by anyone, much less eagle-eyed, um, eagles. Unfortunately, I saw an adult fly off as I approached, naturally taking a tack well away from a clear view, but out of curiosity, I maintained my slow approach and concentrated on the region that it had flown from. This suspicion paid off nicely.
That’s a first-year juvenile bald eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus) working on a fish, most likely (judging from the age, the calls, and the departing adult) brought to it by that adult, which may indicate that this one really wasn’t long out of the nest. This also fits with the time frame, being late nesting season in NY. This is a cropped frame, but not by a lot; the full frame follows:
Yes, this is at 600mm, but I was close – if it hadn’t been for the meal, I’m quite sure the eagle would have flown off. I was a good boy and remained where I was, making only slight shifts in position for the clearest view, with no sounds and minimal camera motion. The dampness of the bark is likely where the adult plopped down with the still-dripping fish.
The eagle was most certainly well aware of my presence, but the meal was more captivating. I’ve seen this from several different species: food takes precedent, and it sometimes provides a slight edge in that, if you’ve managed to get close while the bird was intent on a meal, they’ll accept your presence afterward since you behaved yourself. It’s not a hard rule – many species will simply fly off with their food – but it’s worked more than a few times.
And so you know, despite the fact that it’s only a few months old, by the time they leave the nest, most raptors are the size of the parents, so this bird was big. My working distance was roughly 20 meters, maybe a little more, and this guy stood better than half a meter tall – the wingspan would have teased two meters.
After finishing its meal, it hopped a short ways along the branch, and I shifted position more to silhouette it against the sky, showing off the telltale ‘scruffy’ head feathers, lifting up on the neck, that always made me feel that ‘bald’ eagle was a stupid name; you can always see the feathers standing up! The scientific name is a more accurate description, and certainly more PC.
The eagle never flew away while I was there, so I take some credit for being unobtrusive (or perhaps nowhere near big enough for the eagle to feel threatened – take your pick.) I simply moved on once I had more than enough photos to make it worthwhile. A little later on, however, I returned to the spot directly underneath its perch, hoping to find some feathers, even though at this age, it hasn’t had flight feathers long enough to be molting them anyway. But the remains of its meal were evident.
Huh! Back in my day, we ate the entire bullhead! And we were grateful!
This week we’re meeting Telemachus, just discovering that if you run into a door and you’re covered with spikes, this really hurts. Telemachus wants to be one of the top stuntcaterpillars in the business, and since there are presently no stuntcaterpillars in the business (this being Busby’s Budget Bookbindery in Brisbane,) he’s got both ends of that spectrum licked, actually. This is perhaps good, because he’s kinda hard on airbags and got stuck fast to the big stone ball in the defiled temple, but the blooper reel is gonna be fire, or yeet, or some such genz term. Telemachus is extremely devout, saying a prayer before each stunt and very often afterwards too, though those are mostly about walking again. He donates no money to the church, however, because “donate” does not involve guilt-trips or pious extortion, and are usually for good causes and not billboards trying to find the six people on the planet that have not actually heard of jesus. His hearing is terrible right now, so he’s saving up to visit a mohel and correct this (you probably don’t want to look that up if you didn’t get it.) He does not actually glow in the dark – I know, we were disappointed too. He also has a distinct fear of flying, so things are going to take a sharp downturn later in the summer (stay with us, here.) Telemachus dreams of having a lot of kids eat shit and die; school was not kind to him. His favorite thing to wonder why his grandmother had is a glass menagerie.
If you join us next week, we’ll promise not to continue this until the end of the year, but we’ll still justify doing it anyway by the fact that you keep coming back.
Still plenty of photos to feature, but the posts I have planned are not quickies, and today was a bit busy. However, early this evening a neighbor came by and told us about the scene in his own backyard, so I grabbed the camera bag and trotted (ambled) over there. I’m getting a reputation – good or bad, I dunno, so we’ll just leave it at ‘reputation.’
This is a medium sized eastern rat snake, or black rat snake if you prefer – either way it’s Pantherophis alleghaniensis. It had climbed the straight trunk to find this excavation created by birds, which likely had young in it, initially at least, though I would have thought it was a little late in the season for a nest. There are not a lot of reasons otherwise for a rat snake to be scaling a tree, so…
Definitely a curious pose, and very clearly aware of our presence, but it had also been there for more than a few minutes and is likely spending the night to facilitate digestion. It had better tuck in before the owls get active, though…
Let’s face it, anyone can handle ‘Talk Like a Pirate Day,’ especially when we have no actual idea how pirates spoke, except that it was likely no different from how anyone else talked at the time, save for, “I am the captain now.” But tomorrow, July 6th, is for those capable of truly embracing a holiday, because it’s Walk Like an Orangutan Day. That’s right – we get to show off our best rocking, bowlegged, loaded-diaper gait, alternating between knuckle-walking and raising our arms high but limply, as if drying out our pits before entering the beach shop. Bonus points, of course, for wide-eyed, sad and forlorn looks and very mobile lip action.
I’d go into the origins of this holiday, but it goes without saying, doesn’t it? The point is lost if we have to explain why we’re doing it.
And no, it doesn’t count if we only do this at home, any more than we can claim we sing really well. Out in public, all day long at work, grocery shopping, PTA meetings, funerals… nobody gets to talk the talk. Full-on Librarian. This is our chance to show everyone that we’re serious, not poseurs. We should be committed.
Let me paint the scene: It’s very early morning on Interstate 81 in Pennsylvania. I’d driven through downpours in the Philly area that were reputed to stretch for kilometers, but the roads were dry here. I’d been seeing the sky lighten steadily for over an hour, and knew it was about sunrise, but here in the foothills between the Appalachian and Adirondack ranges, the sun itself might not become visible for a while. Thick patches of water vapor could be seen rising from the valleys, and I knew there would be something scenic to present itself if I kept my eyes open, ready to stop and grab the pic.
Descending, I crossed a bridge – one of many on the trip, but this one was over the Susquehanna River – glanced to the right, and leaned hard on the brakes. The cooler on the passenger seat alongside me headed towards the footwell but was stopped by the dash, while various items shifting on the rear seat could be heard. I was already well aware of the lack of traffic at this time and place, sharing the road with only the occasional rigs which weren’t even visible right then, so no hazards to anyone else with this maneuver. I quickly found a small apron before the offramp that came almost immediately after the bridge and knew the car could be well out of the way there. Hit the hazard lights, jumped out, grabbed the camera from the backseat, and trotted back up the road about a hundred meters to the bridge I’d just passed over.
Seriously, would you have passed this up? All right, then. As indicated, most of the surrounding hills were still shrouding the sun from the rest of the landscape, and it was being in the river valley that allowed this view at that moment. Also, this was only a few days before the summer solstice, when the sun was as far north as it would get, so this particular view would be different for most of the remaining year since the sun would be off to the right.
Had I hit the road ten minutes earlier, I could have caught the sun just making its appearance over that ridge, though it’s possible that, without the sun, I wouldn’t even have stopped; it was the distinct red ball over the water, seen in a mere second, that induced me to pull over so quickly. The mist differentiating the layers of trees gives extra depth to the scene, and the white balance was set for ‘sunlight’ to retain those orange hues – in truth, I rarely ever switch it off of that.
One of the things I like about this is the incongruity, because I know I was standing on on the shoulder of an interstate bridge littered with scrap metal bits and gravel, bouncing under me as the rigs roared past at over 100 kph (usually politely switching lanes because they were empty enough,) the ambient sounds exchanging between that and the early morning birds as the trucks got far enough off. The images are all serene, giving no indication of the warehouse just a few hundred meters to the left, and within an hour or so, the traffic noise wouldn’t abate again until well after night had descended. Every time I see these images, I’ll make that association – which means anyone else will get a measurably better feeling from them than me, even though I’m pretty good about separating the visual aspect from the circumstantial.
Anyway, I got back on the road within a few minutes, happy that I had some solid images already from the trip.
Last night, the rains finally came through, mostly sideways, and it’s safe to say we’re saturated now. The treefrogs were signaling their approval even before it started, while remaining mostly out of sight (yes, even to me,) but they prompted me to go out after it stopped, just barely into this morning now, and look around a bit. I got no photos of the frogs, but found a couple of other subjects to tackle.
Above, our ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba,) newly transplanted in the yard, was demonstrating the faint hydrophobic properties of its leaves. Ginkgos are often called living fossils, which is nonsense, but they are the only members of the Order Ginkgoales, which appears (through actual fossils) to date back to the middle Jurassic period – the structure of the leaves is pretty distinct, as you can see here: no branching, just the veins all originating from the stem itself. At some point I’ll be posting a little more about them, but right now we’re pleased to have one in the yard.
Out front, other things could be found.
This leafhopper was out within easy reach, but small, and my attempts to snag a sharp portrait with the reversed 28-105 didn’t quite nail it. This still illustrates the red color the eyes turn at night (much like the mantids, but theirs turn black,) and the raindrops, but that milky one isn’t rain, it’s leafhopper excrement. I know, right smack in our yard with no one around to scoop it. Class.
The real subject, the one that made me get the macro rig in the first place, was out on the big Japanese maple.
I’d initially seen this juvenile wheel bug (Arilus cristatus) on the underside of the leaves, so white that I mistook it for the molted skin of a katydid, but when it had moved up top I could see the myriad raindrops adhering to it and knew I had to get some pics, especially since wheel bugs are almost fearless and thus easy to work with. This meant I could go in close.
All those hairs help suspend the water drops away from the body, and likely help repel parasites. The huge proboscis down there distinguishes this as a serious predator, which I’ve photographed before. But let’s go in for the real closeup.
The luck that I didn’t have with the leafhopper came through here, in that we can see the eye facets as well as the magnifying properties of the raindrops – this is a little below full resolution. For the record, this specimen was less than 20mm in length, far smaller than an adult. And note the reflection of the round face of the macro softbox in all shiny surfaces in these images, visible once I point it out but otherwise subtle enough to escape attention most of the time, the reason I made sure the illuminating aperture was round; the rectangular highlight of a typical strobe becomes noticeable because it’s unnatural-looking. I’m still trying to balance an ‘even’ light source with the reduction in power that it will entail, because diffusing it more for a uniformly white circle will reduce what makes it to the subject, and I don’t need that. As always, modifications and refinements go on.
