Tag: Naturalist

  • Big Centipede

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    Last August my son’s school started the year with a school-wide focus on insects. When we’d drop him off or pick him up we would see experiments laid out to determine various properties of ant behavior. We collected arthropods to bring in too, butterflies, bees, spiders, whatever we could find. One evening my wife was…

  • Back Yard Oriole

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    We were visited by a female Bullock’s Oriole Icterus bullockii this evening, and the last.  She came to the feeder for the grape jelly.  I guess her kids eat like mine.  What a treat to see her.

  • Birds of My Yard

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    Most of these pictures were taken through a window, with insufficient telephoto and probably insufficient tripod use.  Nevertheless, you can tell what kind of bird they are, and for me that is interesting. With luck, I’ll update these with better pictures over the summer, especially the hummingbird. The broad-tailed hummingbird is my best guess at…

  • Giant Juniper Berry

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    My wife took the baby for a walk yesterday, when the weather was nice.  She grabbed a juniper berry while she was out, because its size was astonishing.   It is pictured below, sitting a US quarter dollar coin.

  • Ants!

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    This morning, in the back yard, the ants swarmed. The first picture shows the main cluster of the swarm, the posts in the background are railroad ties, which are about nine inches wide. The swarm footprint is a semicircle cut from a circle about 18 inches in diameter. There was no obvious reason why the…

  • Focus Stacking and a Moth

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    We found this really neat moth on our porch several days ago. It had already departed. It was in immaculate condition, and seemed the perfect opportunity for some focus stacking effort. As usual I used CombineZM for the processing, and my Nikon D40 with el cheapo Phoenix 100mm f/3.4 macro lens. Combination of about 20…

  • Really Big Bee

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    This morning I had the door open to enjoy some late spring fresh air. We had a visitor enter the house. She is perished, alas, but she is also the largest bee I have ever seen. Tip-to-tip, unfolded, she is just over an inch long without including her stinger. She sounded like a humming bird.…