Posts in Category: garden

Bird of Paradise 

Bird of Paradise, San Diego California

I always enjoy the many Bird of Paradise plants when I visit San Diego in February. The most common are the smaller varieties with the orange and bright blue flowers, but there are also many of the giant variety, with black, white, and pale blue flowers. The big flowers weather rapidly, and it is rare to see one in its full glory. These are just opening, quite fresh, and still very attractive. It is an odd view, as the flowers on the giant plant are generally above my head. This was taken from the balcony of my hotel room, looking down on the flowers. 

Sony Rx10iii at 435mm equivalent field of view. Program Mode. 1/250th @ ISO 200 @ f4. Processed in Polarr on my iPad Pro. 

Bee for Thursday

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I mentioned in an earlier post that there were more insects at the Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens on our visit Monday than I had seen before…especially bees…and especially Bumble Bees. They were everywhere. After a few shots with one in the frame, I began to collect them on different flowers.

Sony Alpha NEX 3N with the ZEISS Touit 50mm macro. ISO 200 @ 1/160th @ f10. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet.

Red-bordered Pixie

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Though the best known US colony of Red-bordered Pixie butterflies might be next to the Burger King in Edinberg Texas,  I came across a few at the National Butterfly Center. One was an orange-fringed and very worn specimen,  but two were full reds,  and appeared quite fresh. This one was tucked back in the foliage high in a small tree. Not the best light but it is such a spectacular bug!

Pixies are Metalmarks though they appear quite atypical for the family.  They are only found in South Texas,  in the Rio Grande Valley floodplain. Finding the few I found at the NBC was one of the highlights of my visit to the gardens…one of the highlights of my visit to the Valley in fact.

Canon SX50HS in Program with – 1/3rd EV exposure compensation and iContrast. 1800mm equivalent field of view. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.

Mocker in the Morning.

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While hunting butterflies at the National Butterfly Center, I came around the end of one of the taller plantings to find another butterfly watcher sitting quietly on a bench about 20 feet away. Nothing odd in that. But between he and I, this Northern Mockingbird bird sat out in the sun, just sitting, not 10 feet from either of us. I had to zoom back to normal 1200mm equivalent from my butterfly working 1800mm to get the whole bird in the frame. Even stranger, the stranger and I stood talking about the bird for several moments before I walked on. The bird was still there, sunning itself, apparently unconcerned about what we humans were up to in its garden.

Granted, if it lives in the NBC garden, it sees a lot of humans, especially at the height of butterfly season in the late fall, so it is pretty used to us…but still, that is a pretty bold behavior for a Mocker.

Canon SX50HS in Program with – 1/3rd EV exposure compensation and iContrast. 1200mm equivalent field of view. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.

And the bird was still sitting there when I walked away.

Head-on White-patched Skipper

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I really enjoy the National Butterfly Center’s gardens! Really! Enjoy! In the fall of the year there is nowhere better to photograph and study free-flying butterflies. The location, within spitting distance of the Rio Grande River and the Mexican boarder, is ideal for tropical species that are seen nowhere else in the US, and you can easily find 50 species on an average day. And the carefully selected and well tended plantings mean there are many individuals of the most common species, and generally a few rare species. In fact every time I have visited,  at least one rare butterfly was on the premises, and generally more than one. A Zebra Cross-streak was seen the day before I got there, and I posed a photo yesterday of the Great Purple Hairstreak…not as rare as the Zebra, but not a commonly seen bug.

This is a White-patched Skipper…one of the spread-winged Skippers. I don’t think it is particularly rare, but it is an attractive bug anyway. This is not a good ID shot, but I like it because to me it captures more of the character of the bug. 🙂

Canon SX50HS in Program with -1/3rd EV exposure compensation and iContrast. 1800mm equivalent field of view from about 5 feet. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.

Great Purple Hairstreak. Happy Sunday!

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I was not scheduled to lead a field trip yesterday, and it was really my only chance to get to the National Butterfly Center and it’s butterfly gardens on this trip. The trade show at Rio Grande Birding Festival does not open until noon, so I had a few hours in the morning…three if I left the hotel at 7am to be at the NBC by the time it opens at 8am, and left there in time to be back to open the ZEISS booth. Seemed like a reasonable thing to do. 🙂

I had heard a rumor that there had been a rare butterfly sighting on Friday, and a sign in the Visitor Center confirmed a 3rd US record sighting of the Zebra Cross-wing in the gardens. I did not see the Zebra, and not for want of looking (as far as I know no one saw it on Saturday) but I did see many other beautiful bugs. This is the Great Purple Hairstreak, certainly colorful enough for anyone, and interesting in how the color is carried. It was found by a group of more avid butterflyers who decended on the garden just as I was leaving.

Canon SX50HS in Program with -1/3rd EV exposure compensation and iContrast. 1200mm equivalent field of view. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.

And for the Sunday Thought: when I arrived at the NBC at 8am on the day following a rare sighting, the staff, and the other early commers, assumed that I was chasing the Zebra Cross-wing. In fact I was not. As I told those who asked, I was just there to see what I could see and photograph. If the Zebra showed up, I would certainly enjoy it…but I was not about to make seeing or not seeing that one butterfly the test of the quality of my day. And as it turned out, that was a good thing, as I did not see the Zebra. But I had a spectacular day watching and photographing the rest of the bugs, and not a few birds, in and around the gardens.

While I was there someone received a call that a Amazon Kingfisher had been sighted about 12 miles south of Harlingen. The Amazon had only ever been recorded for the US once before. I did not even consider leaving the gardens to go look for it. Even when I got back to the Auditorium (home to the Festival), and saw other’s pictures of the Amazon, I was not seriously tempted to chase it. Rich Moncrief, my associate at the festival, eventually convinced me to go down and look…but the bird was absent while I was looking. It returned about 10 minutes after I left to go back to my duties at the booth.

And I am not at all disappointed. I might take a look tomorrow afternoon, after my morning field trip, if it is still being reported, but I might not too.

Again, I do not like to make one bird, or one bug, the measure of my day. If I had allowed myself to be disappointed, even a little, at not seeing the Amazon (or the Zebra) it would have been an insult to the Red-boardered Pixie and the Great Purple Hairstreak, and even the much more common Queens and Peacocks and skippers I photographed, to the hovering White-tailed Kite and the common Green Jays whose images I caught, and to all the other lovely bugs and birds of the morning. It would have diminished the wonder of everything I did see. And that would simply not be right.

And it would, definitely, be an insult to the giver of all these gifts! Or that’s what I think anyway.

Cornerstone Gardens : Garden Play

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The Wine Country Optics Expo was hosted by Cornerstone Gardens in Sonoma CA. If you have never visited Cornerstone, it is a complex of high-end shops, mostly art and artifacts, a trendy cafe, a couple of vineyard tasting rooms, and a world-class sculpture garden. Some of the larger pieces are really landscape sculpture, bordering on instalation art. They are both interesting and strangely beautiful…perhaps a bit over the top for your average residential garden, no matter how grand, but certainly grand conceptions, wonderfully realized.

This instalation, titled Garden Play,  is by Topher Delaney. In the early morning October light I found it irresistible. Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in Rich Tone mode. Processed in Snapseed on the Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014.

So much depends on the red fire-plug…

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Lakeside Chautauqua maintains a slightly Victorian air, in part, because residents take pains with paint and plantings to make it so. You may know the Chautauqua movement from history lessons, but few are aware that there are still two in full swing: the original in Chautauqua NY, and this one in Lakeside OH. Lakeside offers a full summer program of art, music, and cultural enrichment, and its thousands of privately owned homes and cottages are rarely empty for more than a day during the season.

We are here for the Midwest Birding Symposium, an every other year event that draws pretty much the full who’s who of the birding world and thousands of interested birders to Lakeside for several days of workshops and lectures and networking 🙂

I could not resist this little snippet of the Victorian air. The house and the flowers would have been enough but the bright red fire hydrant makes it a mandatory shot. (And perhaps you recognize the oblique reference to the poem by William Carlos Williams in the title.)

Samsung Smart Camera WB800F in Rich Tone Mode. Processed in Snapseed on the Google Nexus 7.

Lily in the rain

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Raindrops on petals…as the Sound of Music has it…are certainly one of my favorite things…and the fact that they made it into song lyrics, and the lyrics of that particular song, is a pretty strong indicator that the feeling is at least arguably universal. 🙂

This is a Day Lily from our yard one rainy morning. Samsung Smart Camera WB250F. Macro mode. Processed in PicSay Pro on the Galaxy S4 smartphone.

Wet Rose Visitor

I went out early on Saturday, just to the yard, to see what a day and night of steady, and sometimes hard, rain had done to the flowers, and to poke around generally looking for photo-ops in the lovely early light. The rain drops clinging to the rose petals, of course, just had to be done. It was not until processing the image that I saw the Visitor. It seems like, this year, you can hardly take a flower shot without catching an insect of some kind. Good year for the bugs! I believe this is a tiny Hoverfly of one kind or another.

Samsung Smart Camera WB250F. Program with -1/3 EV exposure compensation. Telephoto Macro at 432mm equivalent field of view from about 5 feet. f5.8 @ 1/180th @ ISO 100. Processed in PicSay Pro on the Samsung Galaxy S4. Cropped slightly for scale.