The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning

Ed Nisley's Blog: Shop notes, electronics, firmware, machinery, 3D printing, laser cuttery, and curiosities. Contents: 100% human thinking, 0% AI slop.

Tag: Wildlife

Other creatures in our world

Don’t Leave Your Food Unprotected

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:

Webbed katydid with wasps

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.

2012-08-26
Spider: Wrong Place, Wrong Time

I opened the grill cover before lighting it and this critter ran out of the depths:

Spider in propane grill

It eventually crawled up to the gap at the lid, from whence it could bail out over the edge. I fired the barby and, alas, it scuttled in exactly the wrong direction: down its web and directly into the burners.

Made me feel like crap; spiders are good to have around.

2012-08-25
Aphids on Milkweed

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:

Aphids on milkweed

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:

Aphids on milkweed – detail

Where are the ladybugs when you need them?

2012-08-18
Monthly Picture: Hornet in Coreopsis

Another picture from the Quaker Hill trip, where good light made all the difference:

Hornet in Coreopsis

The flower is a Coreopsis and the insect is not a honeybee. The metallic highlights make it look artificial; if I wasn’t there in person, I’d think it was CGI, too.

It’s underexposed by about one stop to prevent those mirrored body panels from burning out and to saturate yellow petals in direct sunlight. Hand-held with the Canon SX230HS in macro mode, then cropped to 1600×1200 without any resizing at all; it’s now the background for the landscape monitor.

2012-08-15
Harvestman Colloquium

For some reason known only to them, one of our kitchen windows attracted a congregation of harvestmen for several mornings in a row:

Harvestmen on window screen

A trio appeared on the end of a honeysuckle tendril that’s making its way up a pillar supporting the roof over the patio:

Harvestmen on honeysuckle

It certainly appears they’re deep in discussion…

They’re harmless and they’re outside, so we let them be!

2012-08-11
Turkey Chicks!

Some years ago we would see two or three turkey hens leading a creche of two dozen chicks. We haven’t seen that many chicks lately, which we attribute to the fox that’s been trotting through the yard and the hawks patrolling the treetops. Recently, a hen guided her five chicks (four visible here) across the front lawn:

Turkey hen with chicks in grass

The family proceeded along the flowerbed at the top of the new wall at the driveway, where the chicks showed that their camouflage works really well against leaf mulch:

Two turkey chicks

If they keep their heads down, that is:

Turkey chick in flower garden

The hen jumped off the wall and flapped down to the driveway, which is no big deal for such a large bird. It provoked a bit of discussion and hesitation among the chicks, who eventually followed her lead:

Turkey chicks can fly

Except for the last and smallest chick, who walked along the wall until the poor thing ran out of wall. It finally showed that it can fly just as well as its siblings:

Last turkey chick flying

Admittedly, turkeys don’t fly all that well, but they get the job done; those chicks can fly up to a branch and snuggle under their mother’s wings, safe from the foxes.

2012-07-21
Dog Tick

There I was, in the kitchen, minding my own business, when I felt something crawling up my shin…

Dog Tick – Ventral

It’s 5 mm from snout to rump, so it’s most likely a dog tick, not a deer tick, not that that makes me feel much better. It’s stuck to a strip of adhesive tape to prevent it from going anywhere and was flat enough to have not fed on anybody recently.

One could develop agoraphobia…

That picture didn’t require focus stacking, although I gave it a try anyway with inconclusive results. I must conjure up a much more rigid camera mount before that works well; a mini tripod isn’t good enough.

2012-07-17