Yesterday's camera-walk was productive in places--the continued drought means the fall flowers are mostly delayed, but the kidneywood, Eysenhardtia texana, has flowered in response to the rain a couple of weeks ago.  Yesterday it was populated by gray hairstreak butterflies, a large black wasp, a subadult jumping spider, and this:


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Last year in north Texas, a wet year created a lot of mosquitos and that created a food source for a lot of spiders in one little park.   The vast webs  they created caused a lot of excitement.

So when, yesterday, I saw a small version that looked a lot like those webs, I started looking for the creator of the web.

And here she is:  Ohnoes.  She"s ( Read more... )

Yesterday, after a fruitless search for my monopod (it's *somewhere* in this house, or SITH), I had to go to Austin for an  appointment...and afterwards went down to the camera store and got a new monpod.

Here are the results of using the better long lens (better glass, faster, more magnification) with the monopod.


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I went out to the yard for something else, and spotted a pair of big dragonflies zooming around clasped to one another.  That sent me back in for the camera...eventually I'd love to get pictures of every one of our species ovipositing, to prove reproduction is occurring.

This pair were Common Green Darners, familiar big green (or green and blue, in ( Read more... )

Though other places got some of the scattered rain here in the past few days (including some seriously good amounts) we did not.  A sprinkle, a brief drizzle, though to wet--for a few minutes--the tops of leaves.  Nothing more.


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Today's fascinating beast was an adult ant lion that spend the entire day on the screen of my study window.  (Addendum: it now has a confirmed ID as Euption ornatum, with thanks to Dr. John D. Oswald at Texas A&M's Department of Entomology.)  Ant lions, or doodlebugs, are the larval form--they dig those pit traps you find in sand and dust.  ( ( Read more... )

In the past we've been subject to rodent incursions of the rat variety (well, the mouse variety too, but they're somewhat less daunting, Hanta virus and all.)   So when I started hearing little scritchy noises on the screen of the bathroom window at night and early in the morning, I worried.   Going up in the attic to deal with rat incursions is no ( Read more... )

Today's walk in the woods was a lot of fun, even when I stepped in some "quicksand" and lost a shoe (momentarily.)

One thing I accomplished was some reasonably good photographs of fish in the creek.  The water is very clear right now (it won't last--it's already not quite as clear as Saturday) so I was able to focus *almost* perfectly on the fish ( Read more... )