For the past few weeks, I have had little time to chase arthropod pics, and even less time to blog about it, but I’m able to catch up a little now. Some of these images are from before that busy time, and some are ‘current.’
I haven’t been keeping up with the mantises as I did last year, but that’s partially because only two are able to be found dependably. Above, one of them provides a distracted pose at night (as indicated by the dark eyes,) obviously less concerned with me getting into its personal space than with something off to frame right. This one was still a juvenile, but getting pretty big now.
Some nine hours earlier during daylight I had followed what might have been the same one, but it was paying even less attention to me, which does not help my crippling insecurity one little bit. The sudden change of head position to a sharp downward angle is a good indication that it saw something, but for a short while I couldn’t make out what, and rashly thought it was chasing shadows.
The mantis was perched on the voluminous phlox plants, which provide lots of layers and hiding places, and after a bit I caught some motion myself, which turned out to be a small jumping spider making its way among the leaves and stems. Its path carried it away from the danger zone near the mantis, and eventually it emerged into a clear enough area that I could fire off a few frames, including one dramatic pose as it waved its forelegs in the air.
While this might be considered a threat display or even a greeting, it was more likely ‘sniffing’ the air, since spiders have sensory hairs on their forelegs. I have so far been unable to identify this species, even though those yellow pedipalps and median legs are distinctive. Feel free to enlighten me.
As it ambled along, I saw a rolled leaf in the middle distance (for a small spider, at least) ahead of it, and suspected that this was its destination. Unwilling to disappoint me, the spider quickly made its way up the stem in question and disappeared into the rolled leaf, appearing briefly at the other side long enough for me to fire off a shot. Some spiders make breeding nests out of rolled leaves, as you no doubt remember, stitching the sides together with webbing to make a shelter for their eggs. In some cases at least, it seems this also serves as the honeymoon suite, to which the eager suitor must gain permission to enter or face the wrath of the female. If I ever find myself with too little to do and appropriate weather (meaning, not as hot as fuckinghell,) I’ll have to stake out one of these bowers and try to get a sequence of photos of the courtship – I’ve managed it once, solely by chance, and watched a couple of unsuccessful attempts.
A little later on, I shifted the leaf shelter up sightly so I could get a look down inside, producing a curious perspective on the inhabitant. You have to appreciate how the reflections from the primary eyes form the appearance of a pupil, lending a horrified look to the spider that isn’t seen at all in the earlier portrait shot above.
The two mantises I can find dependably reside, for now anyway, on the Japanese maple tree, which sits above the phlox patch. I missed their emergence into adulthood (I probably wasn’t going to top last year’s observations of this anyway,) but I’m still keeping an eye out for courtship and/or the laying of the eggs. Today I chased a couple of images just for the updates, even though I wasn’t capturing any behavior or captivating poses – as I said, it’s been a while and I needed to get back into the swing of things. One of them wasn’t posing very readily and was in a tough position under one branch of the short tree, but I fired off a shot anyway, which resulted in a peculiar ‘moonlight’ ambiance; this was because the front window of the house was in the background, and I was at a direct-enough angle to bounce the flash burst right back into the lens, thankfully not too brightly.
I’ll also take this opportunity to illustrate a simple but important, and often forgotten, facet of macro photography. As I did some portraits of the other mantis since it was slightly more cooperative, I was able to do some comparison shots. Both of these were taken only moments apart without the mantis moving more than a fraction; the difference comes from my position. I saw the antenna falling in front of one compound eye, as well as the leaf in the immediate background lining up right behind the mantis’ head, and shifted position slightly, framing the head against darkness instead and dropping below the antenna – the change also allowed the flash to illuminate the forelegs better. Such a trivial amount of effort to significantly improve the photo, and all it takes is an awareness of the background (including knowing that it will become sharper as the aperture closes down.) Increasing contrast at the point of focus always helps draw the viewer’s eye, done in this case by framing the bright green head against the blackness instead of the green leaves, and the complementary lines of leaves and mantis body are a nice bonus. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t consider this high art, but it’s a nice comparison illustration, and the more of this you can accomplish the stronger your images will be.
While in the garden store this morning, in a nursery greenhouse section, The Girlfriend and I heard a strong call within the building, one that I was pretty sure I recognized. I stopped dead and started tracing the sound, and was lucky enough to have the call repeat as I was closing in – no, I did not have the sound recorder with me, nor the camera; rotten foresight for a nature photographer, I know. I took down one hanging plant, started poking around in the leaves, and sure enough found the culprit, a green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) tucked up against a leaf. It had either ridden along when the plants were brought into the building, or had come in through the vent in the greenhouse ceiling, but it wasn’t a very good habitat for a treefrog given the lack of food insects. With some comical fumbling we managed to capture it and tuck it among the items we were buying, bringing it back home to release it onto the plants in the backyard pond.
By this time I had the camera ready, and did a quick photo session with the transplant, who may or may not decide to remain in the area; either way, it has much better access to food, shelter, and potential mates than the interior of Home Depot. Treefrogs do not spend much time at all in the water, but they do need to remain moist, and will deposit their eggs in or near the water so the hatching tadpoles are in the right environment. I’m fairly certain we had a grey treefrog hatching last year, and at present there are five juvenile green frogs (Lithobates clamitans, the more aquatic and non-tree-climbing cousins) living within the pond, though the tadpoles seem to have vanished quickly for unknown reasons. We’ll just have to see what happens.
So I’ll close with one more portrait, because you can never have too much green in a post, right? That’s the way I look at it, anyway.
… but then I rotate them and say to myself, You know, I think they go this way. I mean, if you want the most accurate rendition for these images, the first thing you’d have to do is lay your monitor back almost flat, since I was probably aiming largely downward from above, but that’s the best I can tell you. And if I’m having this much trouble knowing, then it likely doesn’t make any difference – pick the orientation that you like best and boom, you got the right one as far as I’m concerned.
Friday evening, the rain decided to throw down (it was certainly much harder than falling,) and typically for the weather we’re having this year, it passed quickly. As the sun returned, I checked to see if we were having a rainbow, but saw nothing. Turns out it was only being fashionably late, and wasn’t terribly bright when it arrived, but as The Girlfriend and I looked towards the top of the arc, we could distinctly see something that I first witnessed 
This is the same image, but with saturation thrown way the hell up – there will be another version at the bottom of this post. Now the additional bands below the main bow are plainly visible, reducing in width and starting to give a three-dimensional effect, as if numerous bows were stacked alongside one another into the distance, and we’re seeing their undersides. This is not the case, since rainbows are an optical phenomenon of light 
Soon afterward, the sun rose into that line that can be seen over it, in the photo above, which was another solid wall of clouds – at that point the conditions sank back into hazy twilight. I waited around a bit, and was rewarded by the occasional appearance that let me do some more moody breaker photos. For unknown reasons, the birds were particularly sparse on this trip – I did not see one pelican at all – and so the ‘typical’ beach wildlife shots weren’t part of the gallery this time around. Even the occasional seagull or tern was framed against darker clouds and lower light conditions, making it hard to freeze them in midair since the shutter speeds went a little too long to allow this – you’ve seen perhaps the best example in the previous post.
As they get larger, the camo pattern fades, perhaps because they’re faster and more adept at escaping, and also maybe because they’re no longer good targets, in size and defensiveness, for predators. I spotted one ducking into a larger burrow as I approached, and sat down to wait it out, which doesn’t take too long.
This one was about 4cm across the carapace, so not quite a hand-span in overall width, and I wasn’t shooting with a long focal length for this at all; just a little out of the frame at bottom were my crossed legs. The crab dragged up a load of sand tucked into its legs and pincers, moving cautiously but not particularly slowly, and since I’d been sitting with the camera already raised to my eye it was easy enough to get a sequence of frames. Now, the camera isn’t particularly heavy (though I think I still had the flash attached,) but when you have to sit perfectly still in ready position and wait for something to happen, you quickly realize how fatiguing this can be. I could have spent some time building myself a nice comfortable lounge chair out of sand, but by then the sun would have been too high and the crabs would have called it a day. Maybe next trip.
My timing was right on this one: if you look closely at upper right, you can actually see sand in midair that the crab was flinging away. As soon as this action takes place the crab typically shoots back into the burrow, instinctively aware that the motion attracts attention. This makes me wonder what purpose is served by hurling the sand away rather than simply depositing it subtly, which would be a lot harder to see, but I’ve watched this behavior from numerous specimens so it seems to be typical.
This was sunset – what there was of it – at a little harbor in Avon. About all I could do was position myself to place that strange bump in the clouds over the tree to make it look like it belonged there. If you look close, you can see the faint shadow cast by that slightly taller cloud onto the humidity layer above, the kind of thing that makes sun rays (or crepuscular rays, if you want the technical term) in better conditions than this.
While waiting to see if the sunset might improve a bit, I was looking carefully at this anvil cloud well north of where I was, with a couple of rising cumulonimbus clouds in front of it. This kind of cloud formation will often result in thunderstorms, and the heat and humidity conditions of the day supported this possibility; it’s the same kind of thing that causes the frequent summer afternoon thunderstorms (I call them monsoons) in Florida. The sun hadn’t quite set at this time so the sky was still pretty bright, and I could see no actual lightning activity in the clouds, but wondered nonetheless. Traveling north was easy – there are really only two choices from Avon, north and south, unless you happen to have an amphibious vehicle, or wings of some sort. A hovercraft would do it too. But okay, most of us would have just two choices, and hitting NC 12 north would be taking me almost directly towards this distant cloud formation. I decided to chance it, since I had only one other thing planned for the evening, and I could do that just about anywhere.
I cannot, to no one’s surprise, neglect my normal subject matter even when I’m on a trip specifically to produce more scenic and landscape photos than I can achieve in my normal haunts. When stopping to put air in a leaky tire, this very small green treefrog (Hyla cinerea) was startled from its perch near the air hose, so I grabbed the camera and got just a couple of frames. It was getting much darker by this time and I was on the shady side of the building, so I had to focus by the light of a penlight held in one hand, which is a trick all in itself, one that I’ve had to do far too often – one hand holds the camera, while the other supports and focuses the lens, so a couple of spare fingers in there must not only hold the light, they have to aim it where the lens is pointing at the same time. If you haven’t tried this yet, you simply must.
All of this is fascinating, at least to me, but it’s also not really germane to this immediate situation, for one simple reason: this specimen was a juvenile, so no mating behavior was about to take place. What I consider most likely is that it encountered another mantis, quite possibly one of the Chinese mantids (Tenodera sinensis,) but something happened to interrupt the meal, and so it was only partially consumed. I searched the plants for any evidence of another, still wondering how either of them might have crossed the significant moat that is our backyard pond, before realizing that the victim here might have fallen from the overhanging branches. And there’s one other thing that could support this idea.
One last frame, to demonstrate scale – now you understand why my handling of it wasn’t that secure. Yeah, I know, I should be an expert in handling tiny fragile insects by now, able to snag a fly in midair without harming it, restringing damaged spider webs and all that. But I’m still a guy, and there’s only so delicate that we’re supposed to be, you know?
Both of these views, despite their glaring dissimilarity, are from Creef’s Cut, in the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge just off of NC 64, a little inland from the Outer Banks – see the 
Being there at a busy time for tourists, I didn’t attempt any full-length or establishing shots of the Bodie Island lighthouse, even though the area makes it fairly easy to do this – just didn’t want all those people in my images. Instead, I chose a few different angles that hid unwanted elements (like the full parking lot, easily visible from this shooting angle) and still tried to be fartsy – I’ll let you decide if I succeeded or not. I’ve done a lot of shooting around Bodie Island light, including 
Above is the view from the platform seen in a previous image, looking out over the marsh area that borders the sound side of the barrier island – a great egret (Ardea alba) made an appearance but wasn’t inclined to venture closer for a better portrait.
