{"id":26850,"date":"2020-08-26T05:58:36","date_gmt":"2020-08-26T09:58:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/?p=26850"},"modified":"2020-08-26T00:58:53","modified_gmt":"2020-08-26T04:58:53","slug":"on-this-date-35","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/2020\/08\/on-this-date-35\/","title":{"rendered":"On this date 35"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"unidentified
On this date in 2012, I was… I don’t remember where I was, to be honest, but I was taking photos of… I don’t know what these are. I just happened to like this little patch of white wildflowers, and I think<\/em> it was off the back of the property at the old place – other photos from that date indicate that I was home that day, anyway.<\/p>\n

But you know? This date in my personal history wasn’t a particularly productive one, so we don’t have much to show for it – it had to happen sometime. Just for the sake of it, I’m doubling up on the next year to be featured, which is 2017, because I got bupkiss to show otherwise.<\/p>\n

\"unidentified
Three years ago, I was encouraging another butterfly bush to grow in the yard, another Black Knight variety, because of just subjects like this:<\/strong> an unidentified crab spider that would lie in wait for whatever pollinator of the right size to come along. In that respect, it’s distinctly similar to this year, because I have several photos of a crab spider about this same size to feature a little later on, even though it’s on an entirely different butterfly bush;<\/strong> the one from 2017 didn’t winter well, and I made a mistake in the spring that pretty much spelled its death (a tragic mowing accident.)<\/p>\n

That day, I also spotted, only for the second (and so far the last) time, a curious type of beetle.<\/p>\n

\"golden
I should be keeping a close eye out for another of these, because they seem to like sweet potato plants and we have them again flanking the front door. This is a golden tortoise beetle (Charidotella sexpunctata<\/em>,) which show a distinctive brilliant gold color and sheen – at least when unthreatened. When danger is detected, they immediately switch to a bright orange color, reminiscent of lady beetles, and they consider nature photographers leaning in close with macro lenses to be ‘danger’ – I know, right? It is in transition here, just starting to turn orange, so my goal is to get some photos of the nice gold hue<\/a>, which may be challenging, especially given how rarely I see them.<\/p>\n

And yes, they really are completely transparent around the edges, because they’re wanton little things. But without it, they wouldn’t see much, certainly not looming nature photographers, so I suppose it serves a non-lewd purpose too, or at least that’s what they try to tell their mothers. I don’t judge, myself, but you’d think beetles could find more respectable ways to behave… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On this date in 2012, I was… I don’t remember where I was, to be honest, but I was taking photos of… I don’t know what these are. I just happened to like this little patch of white wildflowers, and I think it was off the back of the property at the old place – […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3],"tags":[1817,1816,4064,1370,4063],"class_list":["post-26850","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nature","category-photo","tag-buddleia-davidii","tag-butterfly-bush","tag-charidotella-sexpunctata","tag-crab-spider","tag-golden-tortoise-beetle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26850\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wading-in.net\/walkabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}