Right place, right time

Just to let you know, this is going to be a long post, mostly because of the number of vertical-format images, and there’s a good chance that you’re going to wear out the scroll wheel on your mouse (because you wouldn’t be so gauche as to surf this site on your smutphone or tablet of course.) This probably isn’t the best time to tell you that I’ve picked up a new sponsor read more

Let’s go down under for a moment


“Oh, boy!” you say, “Al’s finally done a trip to Australia [pronounced “Olls-TRAYYLL-yer” of course] and is going to feature something truly exotic for a change!” But no – Al’s still too strapped for cash to pull that one off (damn expensive mics,) and didn’t even leave the backyard for these. What I’m referring to read more

Let’s play catchup


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 read more

Podcast: Macro video, part one I suspect

I wanted to do this one entirely as a video, but the video clips that I had to work with ended up being too short (or, I guess you could say, I was once again too long-winded) to match up audio and video. So it’s both, a podcast covering the main details and a video to illustrate what I was talking about. I’ll get better at this soon. Maybe.

So let’s start with the audio.

read more

Podcast: Getting the feel

I don’t actually think we’re going to have a spring or a summer this year. I think we’re going to just fluctuate in temperatures for the next several months, frosts and snow killing off all the things that start to grow when the temp is higher, until eventually the sun just gives up entirely and stays down.

[There – now I’ve established an excuse not to post too much read more

Woooo, I’m a ghost!

What that title means is that I’m here, but you’d never be able to tell, at least not from my posting or indeed from the number of photos that I’ve shot recently. There’s been too much going on, yet not anything worth mentioning here (and you know that’s not exactly a high bar.)

I got out, very briefly, in the past couple of days to do a few pics, even though the fall read more

Still creeping on the frogs


The initial pics in this post I took just to illustrate something, but we’re going to flesh it out a little more than that. Some time back, I found a pale green assassin bug (Zelus luridus) on my butterfly bush and moved it over onto the nearby ornamental sweet potato, potentially trying to interest one of the read more

They are if I say so

I have a tendency to lump reptiles and amphibians into the same general classification, including within my stock categories, even though either is just as close to, say, badgers – the phylum Chordata is the last common point for all of them. But fine – you want me to make a separate post to break them all out? Is that what you want? Because I’ll do it if you want.

On a trip to read more

About time to get out of the water

In late June, I spoke about some tadpoles occupying the backyard pond, which I’m reasonably certain were green frogs (Lithobates clamitans,) as well as catching a pair of Copes grey treefrogs (Hyla chrysoscelis) in “the act,” more or less. In the intervening time, both the adult and read more

1 2 3 4 5 6 7