Posts in Category: butterflies and insects
Red-saddlebags At Last!
I have photographed Black Saddlebags in both Texas and Maine, and I have one really bad photo of a Carolina Saddlebags from my Kennebunk dragon pond this summer, but my ambition for this trip to south Texas and New Mexico was to find and photograph a Red Saddlebags. They don’t get as far north as Maine and a friend who posted a pic from NM said the last record for the upper Rio Grande Valley is sometime in September, so my only real hope was Texas.
My first day in Harlingen I got out to Estero Llano Grande World Birding Center…which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite places for birding, bugging, and photography…and, sure enough, there were a smattering of Red Saddlebags among the abundant Blacks. I had, however, about given up on getting one to sit still for a photo when I found a little reed tip out by Grebe Marsh where one was returning with fair frequency. I watched it for fifteen minutes, missing it every time…it was in touch-and-go mode…but I made note of the location to check on my way back to the visitor center.
And there it was, on my way back, on the same reed tip…and this time it sat while I got a few shots, and then returned twice to the same perch for more shots at different angles. I was so blessed!
The perch was high, above eye-level, so the angle is not great…but still…a Red Saddlebags!
It, like the Blacks it was flying with, was a well worn bug…likely a migrant from further north mating one last time on its final journey south. (Some of the Blacks were tattered enough for me to believe I might have photographed the same bug a few months ago in Maine.)
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Red-crescent Scrub-Hairstreak
Increasingly Birding Festivals are as much about butterflies and dragonflies for me as they are about birds. I suppose it is just a phase I am going through. This week I am at the Rio Grande Valley Birding and Nature Festival in Harlingen Texas, and there is almost nowhere in the US that is better for butterflies than the Rio Grande Valley. As for dragonflies, there are actually more species in New England than anywhere else, but there are some dragons here I will, of course, never see in Maine. And I do pay attention to the birds as well!
I walked up on a knowledgeable gentleman photographing this Hairstreak at Estero Llano Grande State Park and World Birding Center yesterday. He was quite excited as it is a rare species: the Red-crescent Scrub-Hairsteak. I almost certainly would not have even seen it (it is tiny), and I certainly would not have seen it as anything special, if the gentleman had not been practically on his stomach trying to get a good angle on the bug. As it was I had to go ask.
With the reach of the Canon SX50HS’ long zoom I was able to get decent shots over his shoulder. Estero Llano Grande has extensive plantings for butterflies…and lots of ponds for dragonflies.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. –2/3 EV exposure compensation. 1800mm equivalent field of view. f6.5 @ 1/1000th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Busy Bee: Seattle Washington
The small demonstration garden at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle, the first week in October, was definitely in Northwest Autumn mode. There were actually a surprising number of flowers still in bloom. I am sure the layout of the sunny courtyard with its stone flagging and walls help create a kind of micro climate that prolongs the blooming season. And the bees were certainly taking advantage…busy putting up the last of the season’s pollen to be made into honey for the winter hive.
This telephoto macro was taken at 1800mm equivalent from about 5 feet…that is the full optical zoom of the new Canon SX50HS plus the 1.5x digital tel-converter function. The optical image stabilization of the SX50HS allows for this kind of hand-held extreme telephoto macro.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/160th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Little Blue Butterfly. Happy Sunday!
I am just back from a week in Virginia at our corporate offices. We moved recently, to an upscale business park west of Richmond, and our building is right next to the last in an extensive system of landscape and drainage ponds that run the length of the park. There is a surprising amount of wildlife around those ponds…from Canada Geese, by way of Belted Kingfisher, to Dragon and Butterflies. I always try to spend a lunch hour or two, or some time right after work, around the ponds on every office visit.
This is an Eastern Blue butterfly, and it is really tiny…less than a half inch wing tip to wing tip, so looking at it on the lcd of my 14 inch laptop it is about 2x life size. The little tails make the identification easy as the other Blues common to VA do not have them.
I like how the butterfly floats above the out of focus busy background and how the powdery blue stands out against the light tans of the fallen reeds.
The image was taken from about 5 feet, at about 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical zoom plus 1.5x digital tel-converter function). Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought: I always find a week in the corporate office twice as tiring as week working from my office at home (more tiring even than a week of back to back birding festivals where I am out early and in late, and spend hours at day talking to birders 🙂 I don’t work any harder in the corporate office than I do at home, and I certainly don’t get any more done (generally not as much), but it takes more out of me. And it is not that I get less rest, living in a hotel. My evening routine processing images if I have any, then watching a few Hulu or Amazon Prime shows is the same, and I get to bed at the same time. ?? Though I talk to my wife less, we do talk at least twice a day, and often longer at a stretch than when talk at home some days.
Partially I think it is the lack of natural light. At home I work in front of a window and can look up and out anytime. In the office I am buried in the back of a maze of hall ways, with no view to the outside.
Then too, at home I can walk to the kitchen and make a cup of tea when ever I want to. We have a kitchen, and when I remember to bring it, tea at the office too…but it is not the same. At the office I have to go out to eat for lunch…find a restaurant, and generally since I am eating with colleagues, talk a good deal of business over our enchiladas or pizza. At home I eat at my desk, and spend most of an hour outside about 3 days a week. Even if I don’t get outside, I read or watch something from Amazon and do not think about business at all for an hour.
Of course, the only connection to this picture is that it was taken on a day at the office when I ate alone and got back in time to spend a half hour outside.
The truth is, the weariness I feel after a week in the office, is not a physical weariness at all. It is a soul weariness. The soul (our inner self and the self we present to the world) is, or should be, the physical, temporal manifestation of the spirit, in all times and in all places. It should be the spirit at work in the world. The energy and life of the spirit fill the soul like rising waters fill a spring, like sunlight through a window fills a room with light, like the air I breath fills my body with oxygen, like electricity turns a lump of plastic or metal and silicon and copper (my laptop or my Kindle Fire) into a universe of music and images and ideas…into whatever I want or need from the world around me.
When I am in the office my soul is so focused (necessarily) on getting the job done and making the business work for all my colleagues, that the flow of life from the spirit is pinched, constricted. It is not that I stop breathing the life of the spirit, it is that my breathing becomes shallow, and sometimes it is too long between breaths. It is like I am trying to run my laptop on batteries without ever plugging in long enough to fully recharge, or like the electricity that the wall plugs supply simply does not have the amps to get the job done.
I don’t know that there is any cure for it. I suppose I would get used to it if I worked in the office full time. Or then again, I might just get used to being that tired all the time.
I know that when I have to spend a week in the office, it is the little blue butterflies at lunch time that help to get me through it.
The Bee and the Chicory
Another shot from the Center for Urban Horticulture and Union Bay Natural Area in Seattle. This was out on the trail in the Natural Area. I was walking along, talking to other birders I had met there, when I looked down to see this bee hovering over the Chicory. It never did land. This is the new Canon SX50HS at its best. 1800mm equivalent field of view…1200mm optical zoom plus 1.5x digital tel-converter function. Hand held.
Of course asside from the technical stuff, I just like the vibrant blue, and the bee caught in motion.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/500th @ ISO80. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Spider in the sun, weaving rainbows. Happy Sunday!
My workshop yesterday was at the Center for Urban Horticulture in Seattle, which is adjacent to the Union Bay Natural Area. The whole area used to be a city dump…but the city and the University of Washington Botanical Gardens reclaimed the land and turned it into wonderful little chunk of nature along the shores of Lake Washington. It is a great spot for bird watching, walking your dog, jogging, etc. Between the Horticulture Center and the lake is Yesler Swamp, which is also being developed. There are temporary trails leading down on the east and west to the lagoon off Lake Washington and plans to build a boardwalk over the wetter swamp and the lagoon to complete the loop.
This spider, which I have not had time to id, was one of several who had constructed very large webs along the east trail. The angle of the morning sun was just right so that the web diffracted the light and created a “rainbow” effect (minus the rain…I suppose it is more accurate to say the web diffracted the light into is spectrum 🙂 Whatever…the effect was quite striking.
Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/160th @ ISO800. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought. Almost everyone knows that what we call white light is really made up all the colors in the spectrum…reds and blues and greens and violets. We see it most often in a rainbow; occasionally cast on a wall by prism hanging in a window; more rarely, early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the sun is low, across the face of street sign painted with luminous reflective paint full of glass beads; and very rarely indeed in something natural like this spider web hanging in the sun. Still, often enough so when we stop to think about it, we know white light is, miraculously, all the colors combined.
But we don’t often stop to think about it. We take white light for granted. We forget that red things are red because they reflect the red light within the white…and green things are green because they reflect the green. As a photographer, ie, one who plays with light all the time, I am a bit more aware, but not so much that I can’t be taken by surprise by a spider web in the sun.
I have said before that love is the light of eternity…of, if you will, the realm of the spirit. Many who encounter God come away with impression of the pure white light…again, remembering that that light is love. And yet, since what we experience in the physical realm of time and space is a physical manifestation of the eternal, the love/light of the spirit has to be made up of all the colors of the rainbow, or we would not see all the colors of eternity. There must be a red love/light and a green love/light within the white love/light of God’s presence. Each of us, each of our lives, must reflect back our particular color. Certainly that would explain a lot about the variety of love we see in human beings.
Rarely, there might be a life, or even a second of a life, that is so lived as to show all the colors of God’s love. It might be some instant as fragile as a spider web in the morning sun beside a trail in a swamp in Seattle…but it would be a moment to treasure, a life to treasure and to celebrate. Or that’s what I think.
Tall Aster with Monarchs
The bright purple,
blooming stand
of tall aster,
against the wood’s edge,
behind the cattails of the marsh
draw me…
but it is the Monarchs,
wild for nectar on migration
mobbing the aster…
that hold me
at the edge of breath
for moments out of time.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1680mm equivalent. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Black Saddlebags, Kennebunk Bridle Path
I mentioned in yesterday’s post, that I had been seriously distracted from the Monarch migration along the Kennebunk Bridle Path on Sunday by a trio of Black Saddlebags hunting just where the trail opens out to the marsh from the tunnel of trees next to Rt 9. The trail is narrow there, running between dense shoulder high hedges of mostly Beach Rose (with some stunted saplings and a lot of wild aster and Goldenrod mixed in this season).
We had a lot of Black Saddlebags emerge at the pond I frequent for dragons and damsels this summer. There were generally at least 2 flying on any given day, and often half a dozen. I was more than a little frustrated with them as they stay in the air for hours (sometimes it seems like days) at a time, never perching for a photo. I did eventually find a teneral (newly emerged from its last larva stage) and track it in its first weak flight to the perch were it hoped to dry, and got a few shots, mostly obscured by the reeds around it. But I still wanted a good shot of a Black Saddlebags. I mean…so many…so close!…and no photo??? That can’t be.
I am discovering, however, that Saddlebag behavior is quite different in the fall than it is in the summer…or maybe it is different among migrant Saddlebags and resident Saddlebags. The Saddlebags I am seeing these days spend at least part of their day perched, mostly low in rough vegetation, where they can find a bare vertical twig to latch onto, and as someone in the Northeast Odonata Group on Facebook told me already, they tend to return to the same perch (or one close by) after each hunting flight. I remembered this after startling a Saddlebags into the air at exactly the same spot on the trail for the third time. 🙂
So I sent about 90 minutes figuring out which twigs they were using, and waiting for one to return. Eventually one did…and landed dead head on to me. The best I could do was a face shot, and even then, partially obscured by the grasses between.
The afternoon was wearing on, as they say, and I was getting tired of walking and standing along the same little stretch of trail, so I decided to cross Rt 9 and take my scooter up to the marsh pools on the other side. There is a stretch of Beach Rose and taller saplings forming a hedge on either side of the trail just beyond the pools where I found so many dragons early this summer, and I had, in early July, seen and photographed a Saddlebags well above my head in a tree there. Certainly it was worth a try.
I was really, really thankful to find a Black Saddlebags right were I went to look. This one, as you see from the first photo, was perched side on to me, just below eyelevel, in on a dry flower head near the top of the Beach Rose hedge. It was deep enough in the hedge so I could not get around behind it…but I am more than satisfied with this view. And, it sat there as long as I could want. I left it on its perch when I finally decided it was time to get on my scooter and go home.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 840mm –1680mm equivalents. f5.8 @ 1/250th – 1/320th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
So I have, I think, my Black Saddlebags pics for this year. Not that I will stop looking, of course, but if don’t get another, these are enough to satisfy me. 🙂
Monarchs on the move. Kennebunk Bridle Path
Yesterday I took my scooter down to the beach and along the Kennebunk Bridle Path. Between my house and the Rt.9 (2 miles through woods) I saw maybe 15 Monarchs crossing the road…between Rt 9 and the ocean (about a half mile), I must have seen 50. Standing in the parking area for the beach and looking back along the road in, they were every where.
Then, the Kennebunk Bridle Path, on the ocean side right off Rt. 9, runs through a solid stand of pines and is like a tunnel about 10 feet wide and 10 feet tall and several hundred yards long. You could stand there and watch the Monarchs coming at you, just above eye-level, one going by your head every 30 seconds in a steady stream. It was impressive! I wish I had thought to take a video.
Where the path opens out a bit more to the marsh on either side, I got distracted from the Monarchs for a while watching a trio of Black Saddlebags hunting along the path. More on that tomorrow, but the Monarchs became so common that I stopped looking at them. They were all in motion, coming in off the marsh, mostly on the river side, and funneling down to pass through the tunnel of trees. Eventually I noticed that the goldenrod in bloom along there was tempting the occasional Monarch to lite, so I kept half an eye out for one in good position for a photo.
It was, of course, our little down-home bit of the great Monarch migration. They are headed south, some as far as Mexico, to winter. Some of them will return next spring.
This specimen was actually one of the last photos I took on the sea side of the path before moving over to the other side of Rt. 9 to see what might be happening there. Some of the Monarchs, on closer view through the zoom on the camera, looked pretty well worn, but this one looks to be in good shape for its long journey south.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1680mm equivalent. f5.8 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
Christmas in September, take 2. Meadowhawks
Last Monday I posted an image of a Green Darner Dragonfly mating wheel in a Blue Spruce tree, under the Christmas in September heading. This is even more Christmassy. It is a mating pair of either White-faced, Cherry-faced, or Ruby Meadowhawks. These three, with bright red males, are all here right now and all so similar that I can not tell from the photo, and I did not see the pair from any other angle. You need to see the face, and even then, it is a chancy thing. We also have the Autumn Meadowhawk right now, in great abundance, which is another one easily confused with this trio, but the Autumn would show lighter colored legs. Close as I can get.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1240mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought: I am rapidly coming to the end of dragonfly season. The last Odonata fly in Maine in October. Already the pond, which was alive with dragons and damsels a few weeks ago, is very quiet. You have mating Meadowhawks and Bluets in some numbers, a few Common Darners still flying on warm afternoons, and a solitary Black Saddlebags. There is only one pair of Pondhawks still there, and all the Blue Dashers are gone. I expect one day soon to find the pond and the air above it empty, at least of Odonata.
And, since dragon and damselfly hunting has been such a big part of my summer, both personally and photographically, I am faced with more than the usual fall “what next?” Oh, I know, we will have foliage in a few weeks, and just yesterday my daughter was remarking that the “September skies” are back. By the end of September my travel schedule kicks in, with trips to Oregon, New Jersey, Texas, and New Mexico before Thanksgiving. So I will be busy, and there will be lots to photograph. (And dragon and damselflies still flying in the southern reaches of the journey!)
Still, today, I am caught with that “seasons passing too quickly” feeling. My soul is singing “Where have all the dragons and damsels of summer gone?” The wheel of time is threatening to run me over.
And I was thinking about time and eternity in another context this week, thinking that too often we think of eternity as an “unimaginable and unending stretch of time” when in fact, eternity is the absence of time altogether. Time and eternity are two alternate views of reality, and they exist side by side, or, better, intertwined…not as we picture them, one after the other, sequentially. Especially NOT “time while we live, and eternity after we die.” And every religion worth the name has offered some way out…some way to transform the temporal view to the eternal. The temporal is, well, temporary at best, and often seen as illusion. Only the eternal is divine. Every religion values eternity and devalues time.
Strange that.
Because, of course, rightly seen, time is just the way we humans experience eternity. We see the passing seasons, and we know, especially as we age, that we have a limited number of them. We see people born and we see people die. Here and not here. And because of that we begin to count the moments…to see each moment as one more or one less, rather than as the moving point, the living point, where we touch eternity…the moving point, the living point, where eternity touches the world of matter in each of us. The only true way out is to learn to see the eternal in every moment, to be the eternal in every moment…to live in time as though there were no time.
Now don’t think I am devaluing time here again. What I mean is that we should each bring the full rich living experience of eternity to bear on every passing moment, so that every moment becomes as valuable to us as all eternity. I mean that we, each of us, should become the moving, the living, point were the eternal divine touches the world.
Seasons come and seasons go. The dragons and damsels of this year are almost gone. And the question is not really “what’s next?” It is always “what’s now?”…an eternity of what’s now…a now that is eternal.
And in saying it, I can almost grasp it. I can almost see it, taste it, feel it. It is almost my reality. And maybe that is as close as we can get…the rest…in this as in everything…must be faith.
A moment filled with meadowhawks in a Blue Spruce tree is, by faith, eternal.