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
Tag: Jagged ambush bug
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
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
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
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
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
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)
Looking back, part three
Catching up is taking a lot longer than anticipated, but a lot of that has to do with being busy with other things, among them updating the materials for the photo students, who come first (well, no, The Girlfriend comes first, but the students are still ahead of the blog.) I’ve also tried to space out the photos with a couple of critical-thinking posts, but the flow
Monday color 11
In honor of number eleven and its obvious connection to the movie This is Spinal Tap, we have this bright portrait of an ambush bug, genus Phymata, because… well… actually, I can’t make any connection between them at all. Nevertheless, it is a colorful insect, and much the same might be said for the characters in that movie so, hey, maybe I can make a connection after all!
Ambush
Not what I envisioned
I had an idea this evening as I was doing a routine check on my resident photo subjects, and returned to pursue it when the moon was the right height, but couldn’t bring the reality close enough to my imagination. The grey spot in the background is a waxing gibbous moon in the sky, rendered into a pentagon by using a macro lens with a five-bladed aperture – this is what
1
2