When the weather wasn’t bad, I was tied up, and when I had free time, the weather was terrible. Plus, the terrible weather was enough to take the leaves from the trees in most places. Thus, the autumn color season danced away from me this year, but I think it avoided a lot of people, so I’m not going to feel too badly about it.
So when the clear skies and my availability finally synchronized yesterday and today, I could only do selective compositions – not much of a burden, since these are what I often pursue anyway. A nearby bald cypress tree (Taxodium distichum) had dropped all of its needles early, as they are wont to do – this is where the name comes from, actually – forming a bed for a solitary sweetgum (Liquidambar styraciflua) leaf that caught a soft beam of light peering through the branches. This is one of the few trees in the immediate area that produces red leaves in the fall; most of the others are yellow and brown, and often not very vivid at that, so this is a small representation of what’s visible on a larger scale anyway. The temperature has dropped but hasn’t become ‘cold’ yet (The Girlfriend might disagree at times,) so the trees are looking threadbare yet the ground remains green when not obscured by leaves, and the rain has even brought new growth in places. Curiously, the rose bush that took a beating early this year and looked almost dead all summer suddenly sprouted new growth and a few blossoms at the end of the season, and has more leaves on it now than it has had since May…
Not everything has changed, either, but most of what has changed has fallen, so the nice landscape views are none too visible anywhere. Just one of those weaker years.
I am obligated to report that the arthropod life has not all vanished. The pale green assassin bugs (Zelus luridus) are, in fact, quite active all over the place; I leaned into a low tree for shots of one in particular, and immediately found another walking up my arm. Since this was at my right elbow, I have no shots of this – I’ll let others dick around with shitty phone piccies, while I’ll try for different compositions.
There will be more assassin photos coming along in a bit, especially if I get what I’m trying for, but right now I’m going to fall back onto our old friends.
The family of mantids that I observed in the yard all spring and summer seem to have vanished, but a few of the Carolina mantids (Stagmomantis carolina) are hanging out at the nearby pond. Both were sluggish on my first encounter, since they hadn’t a chance to warm themselves much yet, but they soon became as active as normal. Unfortunately, the wind also started to pick up, swinging the branches about wildly, and focus on the smaller insects (about as long as my thumb) became impossible.
Earlier this week, while the temperature hovered around 12°c (54°f) and the rain was light but persistent, I found a Chinese mantis sitting at the base of a column in front of a store in town. I scooped it up gently, and initially it was so sluggish that it appeared more of a model than a living thing, but it roused itself slightly at the threat and started stumbling off; I placed it on a post out of harm’s way, surprised to still find one in the area. I didn’t have my camera along for that trip, so no photos of that one. But I’ll provide a large-scale shot of the other Carolina mantis from yesterday, just to make up for the lack of posts recently.
Rains, naturally, bring out the mushrooms. These are part of the first “fairy ring” I’ve ever seen, a nearly-complete circle of mushrooms. But they occurred in mixed lighting and the contrast prevented any decent images of the entire ring, so I went in close for a few dancing with the wild onions that are common in the area, which make the task of mowing the lawn a notably fragrant experience.
I only had a brief opportunity for this subject and couldn’t shoot a lot of frames, so this isn’t quite what I was aiming for. A pair of sliders was basking on a log as I approached, but they’re distinctly easy to spook in this pond, and both tumbled into the water as I was firing off frames. The conditions fooled the meter and the turtles themselves got a little washed out, but their reflections look sharp, as well as showing some of the color of the nearby foliage and sky. This was from yesterday; today when I checked the area, the light was completely different and the entire region in shadow, so I didn’t have the opportunity to improve on the shot, plus the turtles bailed the log even faster. So it goes.
But the light was much better in another location, so I chased a few shots of an anxious damselfly, probably a Rambur’s forktail (Ischnura ramburii.) Like the turtles, this one wasn’t enamored of my presence and didn’t hang around for the full photo session. I blame the influences of social-media and the internet.
And to close, another of the pale green assassins, because I liked how all the elements fitted together, plus it’s a decent scale shot. Often enough, this is exactly how many subjects first appear, and to spot them one has to be able to see the change in pattern, the unexpected element that signifies something other than the normal botany; for the Carolina mantis on the white flowers above, the only thing I spotted initially was a leg, out of place because no twigs or leaf stems should have been present among the flower blossoms. It’s a good trait to develop, but don’t ask me how to do it or how long it takes – I just realized that I’ve been doing it for a while now. Nor can I even say how good I am at it, because there’s no one going along behind me to tally all the critters that I miss ;-)
We are rapidly approaching ‘peak’ autumn color season here in this section of NC, which is slightly misleading in a couple of ways. First off, peak is different depending on latitude, humidity, and the conditions that the trees were in throughout the summer, so you never have to go very far to find different color conditions. Second, the trees all change at different times and different rates, so each species has its own time for brightest colors, and the best that anyone can aim for (if they’re looking for broad landscapes anyway,) are periods where the greatest number of species visible are closest together in ideal color. Obviously there’s a challenge to this, compounded by the bare fact that a good wind or rain storm near such times can wipe all the leaves from the trees. However, if you’re selective and go for smaller compositions rather than something like an entire hillside, you can shoot ‘peak’ colors for weeks.
Last weekend was even harder, as the colors were sparse and widely separated, so a lot of selectivity and careful framing was in order – even though only two thin trees are producing color here, the angle made the most of them within the frame, and the stump formed the primary point of focus so the colors just kind of fill out the background as the setting. The sky was too clouded to provide any color itself, so the muted light is communicating the grey fall day thing, and you can see that the colors on the ground aren’t anything to write home (or a post) about. However, after getting back and seeing how this frame turned out, I realized I could have changed my angle only slightly and made that cluster of thicker trunks appear almost to ‘sprout’ from the stump, nicely aligned with the sides. I hate it when I get creative after the fact…
Suspended in the middle distance over a significant dropoff, I wasn’t going to get very close to this one, so I settled for capturing its subtle presence against the backdrop of the beginning autumn colors, managing to get a hint of the orb web in the image. Marbled orb weavers (Araneus marmoreus) seem to be conflicted: visible here and in that previous linked shot, they have very high visibility markings with the banded legs and the brilliant body colors, which is nature’s way of saying, “Back off!” without having the evolve little Yosemite Sam mudflaps, but they depend on their webs not being obvious in order to feed at all. To the best of my knowledge, flying insects take no note of their colors nor the curious ability to hover in midair apparently unsupported, and thus blunder into the webs, but the birds which might consider them a (sizable) tasty meal are alerted by the incongruous contrast and position. It’s one of those funny things, because like the 
Now for a bit of trivia. While shooting this, I had the presence of mind not just to try and frame the sun with the arc for comparative purposes, but to note the time of day and the relative positions of both sun (bursting through the trees near the bottom of the image) and arc, because at that time I didn’t even know what a circumzenithal arc was. I could only estimate the altitude of the sun and arc, but figured 30° for the sun and 75-80° for the arc. Later on as I looked up details, I found a source that said that the arc is usually about 46° above the sun. Naturally, I pumped my fist in the air and whooped and did all of those other egotistical guy things (EGTs.) But then, with some playing around with Stellarium and the view-angles I should have been getting from the lens, I ended up with the sun at 20° and the arc at 59° – wasted those whoops, it seems. Though I’m skeptical, because I would swear that the arc was higher. The site that I just linked to, by the way, says that the best times to see such arcs is when the sun is around 22° in altitude, so that lines up, at least…
I finish off with another selective composition, because the tiny sapling venturing from a hole in the tree trunk was interesting enough, more so with the color. It wasn’t much later than this that the humidity built too high and the light conditions descended into heavy haze, dropping the wooded areas into deeper shade and destroying any chances for colorful backlighting. But we got enough frames for the day, I’m thinking.
Over at the pond nearby, a pale green assassin (Zelus luridus) like the one seen a few posts back posed in shadow on the pod of a buttonbush (Cephalanthus occidentalis.) While I’ve been seeing them from the start of the insect season this year, for some reason I’ve been seeing more of them recently, and mostly in nymph form – this is telling me that their birthing period does not seem to be linked to seasons. My initial go-to source of arthropod info, BugGuide.net, has 
We’re going to gradually turn up the green as we go. In one spot alongside the pond, an unidentified tree was sporting tight clusters of berries, and like the first assassin image above, I picked an angle that would make use of the pond’s surface in the background – again, still working in shade since the light just wasn’t cooperating. An assassin in this composition might have been nice, but noooo, none of them could be found here. Try and make them famous, and this is what you get. Ingrates.
Back in the yard, I found yet another pale green assassin, this time on one of the gardenia bushes. I was just going to ignore it, but while searching for other species I noticed how sharp the shadow was when seen from the underside, and went back in to get the camera again – in the sporadic light of the backyard, I knew the sun could quickly move out of the position where the shadow could even be seen. Yes, that’s the tip of the hind leg peeking out over the leaf edge. I waited a bit to see if the assassin would give me a portrait shot over the edge as well, but like its brethren, it stubbornly moved away from a decent perspective.
While down there however, I quickly spotted something on a neighboring leaf, this one partially shaded despite being not 20cm away. It was another of my 
The shot above was taken aiming almost straight up, so I sat back up and tried shooting nearly level, edgewise along the leaf, and the spider turned to face me suspiciously. This resulted in a series of images that I combined into an animated gif (pronounced “HEE-la“) – not half as good as the video linked above (or 
For this week’s Monday color, we rely on the brilliance of Aconitum blossoms, otherwise known by a zillion different names such as monkshood, wolf’s bane, devil’s bane, Queen of All Poisons, and flake attractor, the last of which is my own, coined after seeing the woo-related claims and usages for the plant that can be found online. While purported to have countless different properties over the centuries, the only two that can be supported with any accuracy are a) that the plant is toxic to a fair degree, and b) the flowers are usually colorful. Many medicinal claims have been made for species throughout the botanical kingdom, and most are anecdotal at best; despite the avowals of numerous naturopathic and mystic flakes, science has not ignored such claims at all, but has tested the majority of them under controlled conditions (meaning, not subject to subjectivity, small sample sizes, and the placebo effect.) The few that actually showed dependable results, like salicylic acid and quinine, quickly became known as, “medicine.” Thus, when you hear phrases such as, “alternative medicine,” or, “traditional medicine,” these can easily be translated to, “not even close to medicine.” Just a little pointer to save you some time.