|
|
|||
The beginning of spring, by which I mean the arrival of the rainy season, is one of my favorite times of year here in south Florida. The damselflies and dragonflies are out in significant numbers again, dotting the grasses and trees searching for food. Earlier this week there were dozens of dragonflies cruising the back [...] [...] 
Grasses don’t get a lot of love. People walk on them, dogs do their business on them. If they get noticed at all it’s only for the time it takes the gardener to sigh or curse, depending on temperament, at how tall the grass has gotten before heading off to fire up the lawnmower. Even [...] [...] 
Fair’s fair: since I made a face map of the dragonfly last week, I need to do the same for the damselflies. For those of you who aren’t hip to the differences between these two suborders of Odonata, one easy way to remember it is think of dragons and damsels. Dragons are large, damsels are [...] [...] 
Those of you who grew up in the 1980s might remember Billy Idol’s rock ballad “Eyes Without a Face.” It’s a catchy little song that owes its title to Jean Redon’s grisly horror novel Les yeux sans visage, which was adapted to the big screen back in 1962 and featured serial murders, a doctor’s daughter in [...] [...] 
Over the weekend I spent a lot of time in the “field,” a fancy name for my small suburban backyard (I say suburban because here in Boca Raton, even with city hall only three blocks away, there is no “urban” to speak of). This was the first weekend after A Lot Of Rain, so there [...] [...] 
For the past few days I’ve been out in the back yard trying to track down as many of the abundant damselflies as I can (four species so far: fragile and Rambur’s forktails, and Everglades and southern sprites). All this time in the great outdoors has been accompanied by some great natural soundtracks—the piercing call [...] [...] 
South Florida is typically described as having two seasons: wet (May through October) and dry (November through April). Hydrologists like to split this up a bit further, with the wet season (now called high rainfall, low evapotranspiration season) running June through October, and the dry season now divided into two subseasons: low rainfall, low evapotranspiration [...] [...] 
In my post last week I talked about how depth of field is critical to macro photography. I found a couple of photos of that Citrine Forktail where it’s even more apparent, although it’s a bit difficult to tease out what’s a result of the angle at which the photo was taken (was the camera [...] [...] 
Last week I started to notice the persistent presence in these here parts of those ephemeral and infernally hard to see odonates, the damselflies. Two forktail species, Rambur’s and Citrine, (Ischnura ramburii and I. hastata, for those of you keeping score at home) are the only ones present so far, but I’m sure that soon [...] [...] 
More and more butterflies are appearing in front of my lens; I doubt that’s because there are in fact more butterflies in my yard. It’s much more likely that this phenomenon is the result of my camera lens being pointed outdoors more and more frequently as the north wind continues to keep the weather nice [...] [...] |
|
||
|
Copyright © 2013 Benweb 3.1 - All Rights Reserved Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa |
|||
