Almond Blossom

If you thought this was a cherry blossom, you'd be wrong.  The look is very similar, but the almond blossoms a couple of weeks earlier than cherry trees.  This is a blossom from a wild almond tree on the edge of our lawn that in fifteen years has barely reached ten feet or so in height.  The main "trunk" is about as big around as my thumb.  I don't know why it is such a runt.  I have yet to eat an almond from it since the squirrels always get them before they even mature.  They are funny to watch actually.  The limbs are so weak that the weight of the squirrel causes them to sag and the squirrels ends up hanging upside down to harvest them.

Photo tips: Try to isolate the blossom against a plain background and don't include other distracting blooms.  Using a telephoto and a large aperture will cause the background to become a pleasing blur.  Compositionally, have the limb cross at an angle instead of straight up and down or sideways so that the photo has more dynamism.  For your own sanity, pick a windless day.  Use of a polarizer is optional, but may be beneficial to control glare and boost saturation.

Vacationing

A mild winter in the east is being followed by an early spring.  Everything seems ahead of schedule - including the return of the osprey.  My wife and I saw a pair of osprey at route 4 on the Patuxent this past Saturday, a full week before St. Pattie's Day, the date of their usual return (to this area).

They vacation (migrate) separately, the female leaving something like a month before the male in the fall and I presume they do not migrate to the same area, so it has been several months since they have been together.  And yet, here they are, both sitting on the nest they have presided over for two previous seasons.  I wonder if they are glad to see each other when they first lay eyes on each other after the long separation.  I would like to witness that first encounter.

Harvestman Spider II

Harvestman are omnivorous, meaning they will eat other bugs as well as plant material.  The one pictured in the last couple of posts was all over the bush as though hunting for other bugs.  Because of their long legs, they could easily cross "chasms" between branches that would stop other bugs, so they were able to travel on the outer edges of the bush without returning to the main stem like say, an ant, would have to do.

It would also sample other things it came across to see if they were edible.  When you realize they are harmless, they don't seem quite as creepy as other spiders and are interesting to watch.

Harvestman Spider

This is the spider commonly known as a daddy long legs.  It is technically not a spider and has no venomous glands or silk glands for spinning a web.  It does have eight legs, however, like a spider.  The second pair are the longest and also act as antennae.  If you watch them for any length of time, you will notice them using this pair of legs as feelers.  The two first matched set of short legs are called the pedipalps and are used to direct food into the mouth.  Unlike spiders, they can eat solid food as well as liquid.  The eye is that little black structure sitting on the top of the body.  They cannot see images, thus the reason they feel about with their legs.  They are also mostly nocturnal.

When I got my 100 mm telephoto macro lens, I went looking for something to shoot and found this harvestman on a nandina bush in the side yard.  The bush happened to be blooming at the time and, once I located this subject, I just started following it around with the lens, which gave me a fascinating look at the world from their perspective.  I captured images as I was able, but they can move surprisingly fast, so I was having to move around a lot.  It surprised me when it stopped to taste one of the blooms on the nandina.  It is also one of my favorite shots of a harvestman.

More Ugly Buglies

I was looking for this photo yesterday and couldn't find it.  It is one of those photos where you wish you had another chance to shoot it because you didn't quite get it.  I almost missed the female at the top of the image.  If you look closely, you can see a slight color difference between the male and female.  The male is slightly darker than the female.

This second photo is also a near miss.  It was slightly out of focus.  In an attempt to salvage the photo, I converted it to black and white which can be a little more forgiving and sharpened it some.  I still like the photo despite it's shortcomings. 

More Awful Bugs

For a couple of years, my wife and I had a pair of white-breasted nuthatches nest in a box I put up on the edge of the woods.  They are a good species to observe raising their young because they less afraid of humans than many other species.  Keep in mind, I am using a long lens, so I am not as close as it may appear.

The thing is, once the young hatched and feeding began (in which both parents participate), they would bring them some of the ugliest bugs I have ever seen.  They would only be gone a minute, so they were getting them close by and yet, I had never seen some of the awful things they were routinely bringing to their hungry offspring.

Carrion Beetle

How can there be so many common insects that are seen so rarely?  I've wondered that a number of times when I come across a bug I have never seen before.  Like the assassin bug posted a few days ago. How often do you see one of those?

Last summer I happened upon a dead squirrel on the edge of the yard.  It appeared to have missed a branch and fell to it's death.  It happens.  If there are no intervening branches for it to catch on the way down, its over.  That is what appeared to happen to this one.  But, what caught my attention was that the body was crawling with what I at first thought were bumble bees.  It took me a minute to realize they were not bees at all, but something else.  I had never seen a bug like this before.

I was doing something else and didn't want to take the time to photograph them right then, so I determined I would come back the next day.  That was a mistake.  Who would have thought they could reduce an entire squirrel to fur and bones in one day?  By the following day, there were only a couple of carrion beetles left.

The club-like antennae have receptors on the ends (which you can pretty well see) which can pick up the scent of a dead animal - or even things like decaying mushrooms or dung - an draw them in from some distance.

The bottom line, though, is in all my years (and, no, I'm not saying how many that is), I had never seen this common insect before.