Buddleja drama

I certainly don’t have to look up that title to see if I’ve used it before…

Some time back, I featured a few photos of a jagged ambush bug (Genus Phymata) on one of the butterfly bushes (Buddleja davidii) out front, and I check from time to time to see if it’s still visible. I’ve now been finding one dependably on another of the bushes, and read more

Historical residents

I got these photos some time back – not quite a month ago, looking at the date stamps – and then set them aside when I was doing the image sorting some time after that, and am finally getting around to doing a post about them, now that I’ve seen no sign of either for a while, though admittedly I haven’t been looking closely. These were residents of one of the butterfly read more

Could this be Al?

It’s been almost a week without anything but my routine weekly post, and for that, I apologize – it’s been a bit busy here, and while I obtained some frames here and there, I never got around to doing anything with them. Today, however, is Prove That You’re Not Dead Day, so it seemed as good a time as any to get them up here. Or for someone to produce a post read more

Almost missed it

I glanced out front just a short while ago and saw one of the Hemaris moths visiting one of the butterfly bushes, and quickly got my camera. The Hemaris species (there are two locally) are better known as the ones that mimic either a hummingbird or a bumblebee, and as such often garner my attention. It was still visiting the bush when I returned, but this may have been due to a read more

Living in the past VI


Back in 2011, I’d planted a whole bunch of wildflower seeds and, very typically I was to find out, almost none of them sprouted. At all. The only one that I could dependably say did was some form of aster, but it fulfilled its purpose in that it attracted a certain number of pollinators, and with them, a certain number of pollinator-predators. This is one of them, a jagged read more

The clock is humming

They don’t even do that anymore, do they? Actually, we have a grandfather clock out in the living room that runs the old-fashioned way, weights and pendulum and ticking and all that, and it remains pretty close to atomic time after I spent two weeks adjusting the length of the pendulum rod. Okay, that’s not hard, but it has to be done in small increments and then observed for read more

At the forefront

August 28th is (don’t you hate when someone comes out and announces something that even a pre-schooler already knows, as if you are the sole idiot in the world who doesn’t, or maybe it’s simply laziness in finding an opening sentence?) Get Up In Phymata’s Phace Day, and yes it’s spelled that way. I won’t insult you by trying read more

On this date 33

We’re cheating a little here, but I said to myself, Why upload images that are identical to ones already uploaded? Which I’ve said a few times in the past, digging through the blog media library, but in this case, I’m sending you to a page in the main site gallery, because this black racer was taken on this date in 2008.

We go a little fartsy for 2011, with a tiny jumping spider read more

On this date 31


This week, we start off back in 2010, with a juvenile eastern fence lizard (Sceloporus undulatus,) quite small yet still a couple of times larger than the subject from a few days ago. It looks like it was taken at night, but fence lizards aren’t really active read more

Let’s do this by category

As I mentioned, I have more pics to put up and have been juggling time to try and get to them – not at all helped by the number of unforeseen circumstances that spring up on top of the routine things already taking up my time. So right now, I’m splitting up the posts by subject matter of the photos, and today is arthropod day.

My attempts to capture more Chinese mantis (Tenodera sinensis) read more

1 2