Living in the past XV


Another from 2014, I always liked this direct portrait of a minuscule crab spider (genus Mecaphesa) – I went back to the original post to find that she measured 6mm across the legs in this position, which doesn’t make her a whole lot bigger than a tick.

Then I looked at the date, which was familiar, and thought, Is this the last arthropod photo that I took at the old place? Because 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

Let’s dig into the stockpile

This is not going to go down into my records as the most productive month that I’ve had – I think I’ve forgotten what some of the controls on my cameras do. So I’ll feature a couple of images from earlier just to keep things moving along.

By the way, I have to get into the habit of flipping through the stock more often. Immediately after unloading the memory cards, I’ll read more

A little more groove


A month ago, I commented on an outing to the NC Botanical Garden where I didn’t really achieve much this time around, I did notably better, even when still not seeing some read more

Encouragement

At the old place I had gotten a butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii) to grow, and it enticed numerous species to come by and pose for the camera. But for some reason, the soil in the yard of the new house is kinda weird and it’s hard to make anything thrive numerous plants have started read more

Macro Monday


I just have to do this to mock the morose Mr Bugg, whose blog keeps writing checks his schedule and dedication can’t cash. If you don’t know what it means to cash a check, ask your grandfather. At the same time, if I go too long without posting Jim’s pics will take over the blog…

Anyway, I had these sitting in my stock folders since June, when out prowling in the yard one read more

Darwin should have been born later

No, not later in the century or anything – just later in the year, since mid-February is a tough time to illustrate Darwinism and natural selection, especially when it’s too damn cold to be out looking for photo subjects.


But yes, it’s Darwin Day again, and to honor it, I have just a couple of half-hearted images (until I decide to arbitrarily reassign Charles’ read more

Defying the rain

The nice thing about going long periods without rain is that scheduling photo outings isn’t difficult – provided you can cope with the heat. The recent rains have changed this quite a bit, and I’ve had to switch several student appointments around due to cruddy weather. This past Saturday, we watched the weather reports on practically an hourly basis and chanced a botanical garden read more

Making up


I did almost no shooting this week, but made up for it a little on Saturday when I had two students, though all of these images came from the second session. This month will be a new record for images uploaded, mostly because of this post, but there may still be more.

The opening image is a monarch butterfly caterpillar (Danaus plexippus,) the first I think I’ve seen around here, and read more

I’m not the only one who’s weird


Courtesy of Jim over at the Kansas branch of the blog comes this shot, taken while I have been trying to locate any resident mantis here for the last two weeks. I’m going to assume this is also a Chinese mantis (Tenodera aridifolia sinensis) having captured a white-lined sphinx moth (Hyles lineata.) Moth and butterflies are notorious for losing both read more

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