Category: Oddities

Painted Lady butterflies seem to be spreading northward, along with the Giant Swallowtails, and three visited the Butterfly Bush at the front window:

The underwing shows four eye spots as distinguishing features:

Painted Ladies have odd-looking “faces” on their front end:

The proboscis works wonderfully well on deeper flowers than these, but they’re not passing anything up:

Another view:

The refueling tube stows neatly for flight:

One had a few notches taken from a wing:

You can’t ask for prettier colors:

These are all hand-held with the DSC-H5 wearing the 1.7 teleadapter, underexposed by 1 stop to keep the dark background from burning out the butterfly colors. The images are very close to dot-for-dot crops from much larger pictures, with a touch of unsharp mask, and no color fiddling at all; bright daylight and a gorgeous subject come out beautifully!

Two turkey hens have formed a creche with seven chicks; if that seems a low number compared with the five in that clutch, we may have just seen the reason.

The turkey flock came foraging across the back yard one evening while we were eating supper on the patio:

The hens began behaving oddly and the chicks went into periscope mode while looking in all directions at once:

After a moment, we saw this tableau:

The red fox entered from the left, then made a great show of ignoring the turkeys while scratching an ear, licking its nuts, and examining the ground as the hens postured and threatened. The fox eventually trotted off to the right, through the grove in the rear, and away.

The flock required a few minutes to stand down from the alert:

And then they moved on, searching for yummy things in the grass as usual…

The pictures are crap from the Canon SX230HS, hand-held at long telephoto, and ruthlessly cropped; the high-res originals aren’t much better than these. I’d expect better results in shaded sunlight, but for obvious reasons I couldn’t move any closer or pause to fetch a tripod. The fox tableau seems perfectly focused on the garden netting, which is what you’d expect from contrast-based autofocus; even if using manual focus would help, the bad picture you get is better than the good picture you didn’t.

This is the season for orb-weaving spiders, one of which laid a great web between a pole and the grass in the front yard. It worked wonderfully well to capture a flying katydid, but wasps got to the victim first:

Maybe a bird took out the spider? We’ll never know, but that katydid won’t go to waste.

This is a dot-for-dot crop from a handheld shot with the Canon SX230HS, macro setting, plus a dash of unsharp mask and gentle contrast stretching to knock the background down. It’s surprisingly hard to get perfect focus on a wind-blown object; this is the least awful of the group.

We have a fine patch of milkweed in the back yard that attracts & nourishes the Monarch butterfly fleet. One of the plants also attracted a dense aphid population:

They’re pretty much featureless orange blobs, although the one on the edge of the leaf at the upper right does show off its legs & antennae:

Where are the ladybugs when you need them?