By about this time in the past few years, I would have posted roughly four thousand mantis pictures. I am definitely behind those numbers this year, so let’s see if we can rectify that.
To begin with, I was super-prepared this spring, having ordered a bunch of Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) egg cases – called “oothecas” if you want to get technical or simply confuse
It is perhaps best not to ask what actually moors to it…
The night and thus the morning was foggy and I was up early with nothing pressing to do, so I headed down to Jordan Lake to do something interesting with the conditions. I was down there for about two hours I think (I don’t really look at my watch when I’m shooting,) and captured something like 175 images. But, this
Early one morning, before the sun was breaking through the trees and clearing away the night’s dew, I caught this juvenile katydid warily eyeing the drop off the edge of the leaf.
I’ve been playing around with photo editing, and decided to toss up a few more monochrome images because, you know, the weather’s turning grey and so you’ll want to see… even more… grey… that’s not really making sense, is it?
Too bad, I’m plowing ahead anyway!
Some of these are relatively recent, some of them are much older, but all of them are fantastic!
I’ve got several things in the works right now, but I’m not sure when I’ll finish any of them, so for now, a grab shot from just over a month ago, when the nights had turned dewy.
I have no idea what kind of spider spins this web, but I’ve seen this many times before, often of varying sizes. I’m always taken by the impression of a sailing ship, or schooner
It’s still early in the fall season here and only a handful of trees are showing any color, but if one is selective, they can find examples and frame them to make it seem much more dramatic than, as was the case here, a single small tree in the middle of a still-green landscape. This is a Liquidambar styraciflua, otherwise known by a large number of common names but
Nature photographers are all familiar with the ‘golden hours,’ times right around dawn and dusk when the light conditions are often highly conducive to great photos. That is, when it’s not rainy or overcast of course, but fog – that’s another thing. It’s hardly golden, but it can be a great element in photos. Yesterday morning as I was
And then, the rains did come.
After making that last post early in the morning and going to bed, I was awoken by another storm, this one centered right overhead – at least, if the explosion of thunder that loosened my fillings was any indication. This one brought rain with it, a good soaking, so I’m no longer conflicted.
I have not been neglecting my arthropod subjects, even though I’m
Posting is still slow – I’m finding a lot of my time taken up with other things, boring things from a blogging perspective – but I’m trying to keep up with images at the same time. There will be another post featuring various arthropods coming shortly, but for now I’m going to focus on just one.
One of the many mantises that had inhabited the Japanese maple has now switched
I had to wash off some things outside a short while ago, and while draining the hose, I set the sprayer for ‘mist’ and applied a liberal coating to grasses where I knew some of the praying mantises lived I was rewarded with seeing one of them scamper up and begin drinking deeply from the water droplets adhering to the leaves. Of course, I trotted (it might have been