Posts in Category: butterflies and insects
Heliconians: National Butterfly Center
Haliconians. Zebra and Julia
Longwings (Haliconians) are among my favorite Rio Grande Valley butterflies. They are, to me, the very definition of exotic. Graceful, slow fliers, they often nectar with wings fully spread so they are ideal photographic subjects, and there is nowhere better to photograph them than the National Butterfly Center in Mission TX. I always attempt to spend at least a morning at the NBC on every trip to the Rio Grande Valley. Here we have the Zebra, one of the first butterflies to great me at the NBC gardens proper, and Julia, which another visiting couple pointed me to later in the morning.
Sony HX400V at various focal lengths. Processed and cropped in Lightroom on my Windows tablet. Assembled in Phototastic.
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Comma Butterfly
The Comma and the Question Mark are relatively large Bushfoot Butterflies. They are both found in New England but I rarely see either. They look enough alike so I always have to consult the guide when I do. Their distinguishing mark, and the mark that gives them their names, is a tiny squiggle on the underwing, which looks slightly more like a comma in one and slightly more like a question mark in the other. You really need the bug in hand to use that, so I go by the extra dot on the upper forewing on the Comma. This specimen is from my final walk (for this trip) around the trails behind the Hawk Watch at Cape May Point Lighthouse State Park in Cape May New Jersey.
Sony HX400V at 2400mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 250 @ f6.3. Processed in Snapseed on my tablet.
Painted Lady Backside
Common Buckeye in an uncommon pose.
A birding couple I met on the beach on Saturday told me about Timber Point and Timber Island trail at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge. They were up for the day from Massachusetts, chasing eBird reports of birds of interest. I live practically next door to Rachel Carson Headquarters, and I had never heard of Timberpoint or Timber Island. A little research turned up the facts. It is a new trail and a new property for the NWR system, acquired after a locally organized fund-raising drive that covered the $2 million plus purchase price. It is a point of rocky upland and mixed forest extending out along the ocean side of the Little River across from Goose Rocks Beach and south of Fortunes Rocks. At low tide you can walk out to Timber Island. Local volunteers, along with the Civilian and Youth Construction Corps, built trails and boardwalks as needed and one raised deck overlook, and installed a Tide Clock near the head of the passage to the Island. It is altogether a wonderful spot and one that I will add to my regular round of photoprowls. It was dead high tide when I was there yesterday of course, but I plan to get back there the first sunny day we have at low tide.
There were lots of the typical birds of the Maine fall: Yellow-rumped Warblers, White-crowned Sparrow, Song Sparrows, Lincoln’s Sparrow, Brown Tree-creeper, Rufus-sided Towhee, Blue Jays, etc…as well as hundreds of chipmunks busy gathering acorns…and 5 species of butterfly: Cabbage White, Clouded Sulphur, Red Admiral, Painted Lady (pictured here in an uncommon pose), and Monarch. I will post an extended Photoprowls piece later today.
I like this backlighted pose of the Lady…which is good since every effort to get on the sun side of the bug lead to its moving deeper into the brush off the trail.
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. Shutter preferred. 1/640th @ ISO 320 @ f6.3. Processed and cropped slightly in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Female Green Darner
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From the looks of things the flood of Green Darners coming south may be over. This is from last week, at Laudholm Farm, on a particularly busy Darner day. I was able to photograph both male and female Greens as they perched, though the specimens were more than a mile apart. That might give you an idea of the size of the swarm. At both locations, there were 10-15 Darners visible in the air at any given moment. That is a lot of Darners on any day. 🙂
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. ISO 100 @ 1/250th @ f6.3. Program with -1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Chinese Mantis
We always called these “Praying Mantis” when I was growing up. A little research this morning tells me that we have two species in New England…European and Chinese, both introduced, and both common. The large size of the bug and length of the antennas (antenni?) make this Chinese. We found it in the lower meadows at Laudholm Farm on Saturday. It flew in right in front of me and landed. The flight is highly distinctive and surprisingly unlike the bug when it lands. My wife did not see it land and could not find it, even though she believed me (I think) when I said it was there. 🙂
Sony HX400V at just over 1000mm equivalent field of view. ISO 200 @ 1/250th @ f6.3. Program with -1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Orb Weaver on the Kennebunk Plains. Happy Sunday!
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I got to the Kennebunk Plains and Day Brook Pond early enough this week to catch the dew on the spiderwebs, and there were some spectacular webs. 🙂 The angle of the sun was just right to light them up. After photographing this particular web for effect, I noticed that it, unlike most of the others, was still inhabited, so I took a little detour off the path for a closer look. It is clearly some kind of Orb Weaver, but I can’t pin it down more than that. This is, to me, a very satisfying image…I love the light caught in the droplets on the web, the detail and color of the spider, and the out-of-focus landscape in the background making a horizon.
Sony HX400V at about 68mm equivalent field of view. Macro. ISO 80 @ 1/1600th @ f3.5. Program with -1/3EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
And for the Sunday Thought: I know many people have a thing about bugs, and spiders in particular. It is perhaps (as I am pretty sure has been suggested many times by better men than I) a residual fear based on the fact that some of them can hurt us, and a very few of them can kill us. Same with snakes. It seems to be more a female thing…perhaps maternal, as in protecting the helpless infants and hapless kids from all that might harm them. If it is not instinctive in males, it can certainly be learned. To really see a spider we have to sidestep that fear if it is still in us. Then too, spiders break the leg rule. They have too many legs, too many limbs. Everything we love has 4 limbs. Spiders have two extra. What’s up with that? Creepy.
On the other hand, who does not love a spider web jeweled with dew? Logic tells us that a web needs a spider, but we are not always logical…we are rarely logical when it comes to what we like and dislike, and almost never logical in what we fear.
On the other hand, the spirit compels us to view all that lives as beautiful, because it was created by a loving God, the same God that created us. The web of life should be as appealing as a spider web jeweled with dew in the morning sun, and each creature a drop on the web, refracting the pure light of creation in its own unique way. The spider has its beauty if we are willing to look closely enough. If we are willing to know spiders.
And of course, one of the things we learn to know is that a few of them can, if we do not give them their space, hurt us. We know who they are and learn to respect them, and, unless one ends up in your sleeping bag, as a Brown Recluse did in mine on a trip to Arizona, they will not bother us. The scar on my leg is a good reminder to check my sleeping bag before getting in. We learn to give all spiders, all creatures, the space they need to live. Not simply because they might be dangerous, but because they are, each one in its own way, lovely…created with love.
Happy Sunday!
Green Darner Invasion!
I have never seen as many Green Darners as I have this fall. For weeks now, on a good day, you can see hundreds (probably thousands if you stayed in the right spot long enough) coming through on their way south. They come in swarms. There will be a few Wandering Gliders mixed in, and the occasional Black-saddlebags, but mostly they are all Greens. They bring out what I assume are our resident Canada and Green-striped and Black-tipped Darners to do battle over their territories, but the Mosaic Darners could be migrating with them. Hard to tell. And hard to find one of the Greens perched. I did find one male and one female that sat long enough for photos on my last trip to Laudholm Farms. This is the male.
Sony HX400V at 1200mm and 2400mm equivalent field of view. ISO 250 @ 1/250th @ f6.3. Program with -1/3 EV exposure compensation. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet. Assembled in Pixlr Express (web version).
Slender Spreadwing
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The meadows at Emmons Preserve have been very good this summer and last for Odonata. Still a beginner, I have many first sightings and first photos from Emmons. I have, if memory serves, at least one other photograph of this species, but it is rare enough be just a little exciting when I get another. The total lack of pruinocity on the tip of the abdomen and its length and thinness make this almost certainly a Slender Spreadwing, and the light tips on the wings are good for that species too. 🙂
Sony HX400V at 2400mm equivalent field of view. ISO 160 @ 1/250th @ f6.3. Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.
Painted Lady visits Maine
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I remember standing on a soccer field in Rehoboth New Mexico and watching hundreds, probably thousands, of Painted Lady butterflies cross the an imaginary line drawn across the field. They were on their way from Mexico to repopulate North America, wave on wave. They do it every year. While the American Lady butterfly is fairly common in Maine, Painted Ladies only occasionally get this far north. What a treat to find one on a photoprowl down by the lower Mousam River earlier this week.
Sony HX400V at 1200mm equivalent field of view. ISO 80 @ 1/400th @ f6.3. Program with -1/3EV exposure compensation. Cropped slightly and processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro tablet.
Green-striped Darner
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The business end of a Green-striped Darner. It has been an odd year for Odonata in Southern Maine. Common species have been uncommon…way down in numbers…and some of my best ponds have been particularly unproductive. At the same time, there have been lots of Green-striped Darners, a species that I had not seen here before this summer…though they are definitely here every year…I had just missed them. You could not miss them this year. 🙂 And there have been swarms of Green Darners over the past few weeks. I assume they are migrating down the coast, but yesterday, for instance, over the marsh ponds along the lower Mousam, there were hundreds of Darners…15 and 20 in the air at any moment.
This Green-stripe is at Day Brook Pond on the Kennebunk Plains, and is my first ever perched GSD. It sat very patiently on this White-birch log while I worked all around it, balancing on beaver clipped saplings over saturated moss at the pond’s edge to get the right angles. This is an actual macro shot (as opposed to a tel-macro), taken quite close in at about 66mm equivalent field of view. ISO 80 @ 1/125th @ f6.3. I used program shift to dial the aperture down to f6.3 for greater depth of field. Sony HX400V.
Processed in Lightroom on my Surface Pro 3 tablet.