This will be my final post about the cottage, at least until next visit, just to spotlight three photogenic arthropods we encountered over the weekend. And what fun I'm having with the macro function on the Canon PowerShot A620.

Is it just my imagination, or are butterflies particularly numerous this year? Last year I heard tales about the ( Read more... )

Oak savanna is one of North America's rarest habitats. Once covering 13 million hectares along the boundary between the prairies and eastern woodlands, it has been reduced to less than 0.02 per cent of its former area. Two-thirds of Pinery Provincial Park's 2,600 hectares are covered by a mixture of oak savanna and oak woodland. This is one of the ( Read more... )

The insect I identified here a few weeks ago as a walking-stick was not, but instead a grass mantis, Thesprotia graminis. What's That Bug refers to it as a "southern species", and all online references associate it with Florida, but it was perched on my dock in Central Ontario on April 29, about three weeks after ice would have disappeared from the ( Read more... )

On our walk through Little Tract Thursday afternoon, Brenna and I mostly saw mosquitoes. Nasty. It's a lovely mixed forest, with a pine plantation at one end, mature maple woods at the other. I heard pine warblers, chickadees, crows, cardinals and a nuthatch.

And peacocks. Nothing is more disconcerting, when walking through the woods, than to hear ( Read more... )

First of all I have an HTML question. In order to comply with Flickr "Terms of Service" I am incorporating a link back to the site with each photo. However I want grey borders instead of the colours otherwise associated with links. To do this, I set the photo border to "0" and enclosed it in a single-cell table with cell padding 5, and table ( Read more... )

I've submitted a story for Wednesday's 1001 Nights Cast to be webcast at 17:12 Sydney time, 3:12 EDST.

I've been thinking about small things. Flowers with sexual parts so small the eye can hardly see. Tiny bugs that turn into monsters in front of a camera.

Some bugs aren't so small, like this stick insect, about 7.5 cm (3 inches) long. Canada has ( Read more... )

One of the earliest spring insects, this chironomid was only about 5 mm long. I cropped the photo somewhat, but the resolution is still decent, and I'm thrilled to be able to take this photo at all. Larger insects will easily fill the lens. This bodes well for fun summer photography.

Chironomids are common members of Order Diptera, the flies, ( Read more... )