F is for First Decent Walk of the Year!

I always mean to post more non-toy-soldier stuff than I do, so while there are thousands of often quite good images of insects, when I do get around to posting some, they aren't always the best, but I like a narrative, and I managed to have my first proper walk of the year the other day (24th April), and found a long hedge, at the top of a dip slope on the downs near Borden, which was facing a very warm sun, and saw loads of butterflies, not all of which were hanging around to be photographed, so missing from these shots are Orange Tips, Small Tortoiseshells, Whites and a Brimstone, but I did get these others.

 

Peacock

It actually posed for me, and when I swore. as it closed its wings, it opened them again!

 

Red Admiral launching.

 

 

 

There were loads of small Holly Blues, but they were actively having what is best described as an orgy, and while I took dozens of shots, most of them are rather blurry, or one of the pair is missing altogether, or I just shot holly leaves!

 

There's a small striped, solitary 'Digger' wasp in there somewhere!

These are the ones who tunnel into well-trodden sandy paths, or bare banks. 

 

 

 

 

Not sure what these are, I need to look them up.

Some kind of fly, maybe Willow Sawflies, with notably long antennae.

 

I thought this was a very big version of the 'Basingstoke Orange Bums' as they were called in our family (Mum had some notion they 'came out of' Basingstoke, to compete with her honey-bees! A journey of about 8-miles), but later following it along the ground for a while, trying to get decent shots, I realised it was probably a [larger] queen, of the aforementioned, looking for a suitable nesting site. She's actually a 'Red Tailed Bumblebee'

 

First Hover-fly of the season, among my favourites.

 

Once they've had some pollen or nectar for sustenance, as the one above was, the Digger Wasps will hunt and take these as larder stock for the small broods - booooo! Raw in tooth and claw!

Standard Buff-bottom, sharing a dandelion with another solitary wasp type, possibly Oxybellus, from the silver and black striping?

 

Robber- or Horse-fly? I was probably lucky not to be bitten by one, while I was concentrating on other things, I often get a bite on the shoulder or back as I'm doing this, especially if I'm only in a T-shirt. There were sheep in the valley at the bottom of the dip, and these biting flies do seem to go hand-in-hand with livestock!

N is for New Camera!

I have really needed a new camera for over a year, and meant to get one back in the Spring, last year, or at least I said I'd explore the possibility of re-instating Adsence to see if it might pay for one ('on paper' is should have!), but it turned out Adsence isn't as easy as it used to be and the appeal process takes up to six-months, not that I bothered.

Then, about this time last year, I was walking in the woods at the back of the pond on a hot day photographing wildlife when I lost the grip on the camera and it flew-off, mercifully landing in some soft pine-needle leaf mould under a Scot's Fir.

I didn't notice for a few days but the large jigget on the lens (which had become an obvious problem) had been knocked out of the way, bargain! So I carried on with it for another year, but recently the lens opening/closing mechanism had been playing-up (a common problem with them), so I knew it had to be replaced and was hoping it would last until after the storage unit move (8 weeks Wednesday if my sums are right) - when it's battery housing went phutt!

I umm'ed and arrh'ed at what to get, popped into Farnbourough and looked around, checked Argos (four day wait) and ended-up getting basically the same machine from a Swiss dealer off Amazon - yeah! Kill the High Street!

The reason I picked the same machine is because the dead one (which can still serve in an emergency) was four years old to the month practically, and was therefore the longest-lasting of the six I've had since 2007. They all died (with the exception of the first, a Fuji) because they are carried 24/7, bare, in my trouser-pocket and get hard-knocks and lots of fabric-lint and other dust working into their bodies. They also get a lot of use, I may pull them out several times a day, in addition to actual toy 'photo-sessions'.

But, - as you can see from the above - the worst problem with a long-lived one, is electronic dust. You can format the SD-card occasionally, or even get a new one, but there is a build-up of electronic 'crap' on the camera's own brains, both the main memory and the exposure screen/sensors and there's nothing you can do about that.

Those two photographs were taken a few seconds apart - as long as it took to remove the elastic-band and swap the batteries and SD-card - with identical settings (macro and two stops down on the exposure) with unchanged artificial light.

The same thing, just like with humans - the fog of age!

It was still taking OK pictures, but I had 'excused it' to you a few times since the autumn, usually when shooting in poor light. Soooooo . . . should be some improvement in pictures for a while, but there's a lot of old ones in the queue and other peoples images, scans &etc, so it shouldn't actually be that noticeable?

Cover the lower image with a book or your hand and the upper image is acceptable, but comparing the two is sobering! You have no idea, with digitals; how the camera is slowly degrading.

I'm going to try and keep it in a little self-seal bag (or series of self-seal bags, they won't last long in a pocket either!), this time, to cut the ingress of particles, but they weren't ultimately the problem, it was the battery trap-door catch, killed the camera!

The Second Fuji was OK, three years, but it's brain went very suddenly and while there had been global recalls of the same units a year or two earlier, I was in another legal battle at the time so couldn't be arsed to pursue Fuji (who claimed they couldn't find the crappy images of the rose I put on the blog which showed the problem!), and when that battle settled I bought a Samsung (in cherry red to match my 'phone! Tart!) in late 2011.

When the lens-winding mechanism on that one failed in 2013, I got a similar Nikon, on offer at Argos for 40-odd quid, that was an L27, and when the lens-wind went on that; within a year, I rushed up to the local Argos with the warranty (and the receipt - always keep it for the first 12 months!) and they happily gave me an upgrade/replacement for nothing.

As the 29 did so well, I've stuck with the Nikon's, all three - L27, 29 and A10 - are 16.1 mega-pixels; I toyed with a 20.1, but the extra expense didn't add up to the limited extra image size, so I went with the same again!

This problem with the winding mechanism probably is connected to the dust and pocket-fluff - wearing down the very fine bayonet-fit channels and the little ears that travel in them, telescoping the lens's; in the end the ears pop-out of the channels and the micro-motor rattles like a dying thing!

F is for First Bee . . . Not!

Actually it's the second, I saw my first flying bee about three weeks ago, even as the weather was closing in for the 'Beast from the East' (and the bloody 'i' ran with 'Snowmageddon', as I had predicted someone would in a post earlier that week - Grace Dent; shame on you!), it was a little black one with an 'international orange' bum, and it shot into a land-drainage pipe, set in a retaining wall outside an office building, so fast I didn't have a chance to photograph it.

This was the first of several today (Saturday 24th March), but it had been shut in the little greenhouse unnoticed, yesterday and was looking a bit weak, so I placed it on the daff' for a feed in the hope it would regain its strength and fly home.

They don't always go down the trumpet, I photographed this one in 2009, and you can see it's made one hole already in the back of the Daffodil, and is busy making another, I believe it had also felled the flower by cutting though the stalk first, in order to have a more stable 'breakfast bowl'? They suck the nectar straight from the reservoir - The vandals!

R is for the Real Small Scale World!

I'm well behind with these, I've taken lots interesting stuff in June and July, but these are actually from May! I'll post soldiers (or cowboys!) later.

Sheild Bug - I love shield bugs, they're the best, like little alien knights in camouflaged armour! This is a Forest Shield I think?

Chafer - one of the lesser chaffers, common Garden Chaffer or something. And Insect porn! Oh baby, is that your wing-case or are you pleased to see me!

Caterpillar - There are so many caterpillars in green with a pale stripe down them I daren't try to ID it as a rank amateur, but it'll be one of the Whites . . . probably!

Weevil - or not? My absolute all time favourite insect might not be the weevil it appears to be at all, but rather a faux-weevil called the Aspen Beetle or Byctisus Populi, although given the size of most of these (common on our hazelnut) I think they may actually a weevil, the weevil the Aspen pretender is pretending to be - if you have an aspen rather than a hazel?

Bees - A selection of bees!

Mixed - an Ichueumon Fly (kind of parasitic wasp) or other wasp, possibly a Field Digger top left, a Hover-Fly below it; possibly one of the Sun Flies and two shots of a Cockchaffer or 'May Bug', they never come out - the flying shots - camera doesn't know what it's looking at, or where!

Lilly Beetles - invasive species, damaging, they both died, but they're pretty.

F is for the First Hornet of Spring . . .The First Hornet of Summer!

I like the hornets, they get a bad press, but are in fact less aggressive than wasps (who are - themselves - less aggressive than their press!) and have become regular visitors to the garden, always happy to pose and never having had a go at me!

Tuesday found all these (cropped and collaged to approximate scale with each other) sunning themselves on the fence panels, although two were also busy making wood-pulp for their paper nests.

The hornet (left) is a newbie, and not much bigger then a queen wasp; half the size of the big brutish-looking ones who will be getting drunk on wind-fall apples in five months time! The wasp is a worker, there has been a queen hovering round the back of the house looking for somewhere to start a nest, but this is the progeny of a sharper one, who's already got started elsewhere!

The bee seems to be a carder or mining bee of some sort, or maybe a rarer eucera? People tend to call them all bumble bees but most of them aren't! I shoot loads of fury bees through the year and one day I'll sit down with a good bee-book and sort all the pictures out - then I'll really bore you!

Earlier (last week particularly - but for most of a month now) we've had some lovely weather and a lot of butterflies have been out, I've seen holly blues, an over-wintered peacock (in March), lots of brimstones and various small whites (mostly female brimstones and female orange tips), these are speckled woods which were sunning themselves on the Spirea

At the same time I caught this ant dragging a fortnight's rations home to the nest! I have a little video I'll try and upload to Youtube, if successful a link will follow. I think the victim is a smaller beetle larva.

That worked! I'll have to do more video's? 

My favourite butterfly at this time of year (it used to be brimstones, but they are two-a-penny!) is the orange tip (or copper tip) and they can be fidgets; difficult to catch, but on cool mornings  they prove a little sluggish before they've topped-up the tan, and can be photogenic!

Something that's really hard to shoot is the bee fly, it never stops and so is never in focus as every (literally 'every') fibre of its being is vibrating like a humming bird! I love them, they seem to be a cross between teddy-bears and alien Starfighters - little pointed triangles of purposeful fur!

This is some kind of dwarf euphorbia I think, the flies and hoverflies love it at this time of year.

I also shot these commas at the end of March, the wing-edges are lacking the usually more uneven topography or crenellations distinctive of the species (particularly the left-hand example), probably due to them being over-wintered specimens who's wings have somewhat 'rounded off' with wear and tear!

It also has the darker colouration of the winter generation. The commas have two generations per year, which makes the instinctive behaviour of each all the more remarkable, as all the genetic coding has to jump a 'season' in order to get the child to act like the grandparent, not the parent!

We dumb, curious monkeys struggle to teach basic manners to our children with the aid of a compulsory schooling process, a police force and a judicial system - yet we're threatening most butterflies and most other life on earth!

L is for lifesize

I know we've had that title before, but i'm not feeling inventive today and I haven't posted wildlife for ages, these were shot in an hour or so on the 7th of this month, between rain showers!

This first one is a bit of a mystery, it looks a bit like a weevil, or a scarlet lily beetle and was found on a day-lily, so you might think it's a green domestic version of the red intruder, but I can only find a more weevil-like thing in the books called Byctiscus Populi which lives on Aspen...anyone recognise it?

Buff Ermine moth, he/she had a lovely orange and black tiger-striped (stripped? The one the doesn't involve the removal of clothes!) thorax, but it was difficult to photograph as you could only see it when it was fapping it's wings, which is when you can't get a decent shot in focus!

Emperor Dragonfly, sitting and in flight, our best dragonfly by a mile! Snail on the march and a Ringlet Butterfly. I also took loads of shots of various slugs - who knew we had so many species of slug! - but I've spared you those pictures.

A female Beautiful Damoiselle, our largest damoiselle, the male is bluer. Yes; it's official name is 'beautiful', how nice is that!

N is for Natures Bounty!

I spent the afternoon rewarding myself for all that mud-puddling! And the bee-stings; 5 and counting this year, only 7 in the whole of last year, mowing is pretty-much out 'till they calm down a bit!

The blackcurrants were actually growing wild between the railway and the pond, someone tipped their garden-waste into the reeds in the dark - no doubt..there are lots of little ones, so a commando-raid in the autumn may well see us with a line of canes in the new year!

Also round the pond has been this chap (or chappess?), started life about 4 weeks ago, shorter that my little finger-nail and mistakable for a little bit of dried leaf, now the size of my thumb, and always easy to find as it hangs around on top of the hazelnut leaves, clearly birds have learnt a lesson there...leave well alone. Google tells me it's a Rusty Tussock-Moth.

Meanwhile when I first found these (there's a whole bunch of them) I wondered if they had a parasitic or fungal disease, but apparently they are meant to look like bird-lime! And while caterpillar-like, they are actually 'just' larvae; of a Saw-Fly.

T is for Tourney

Clearing-out/scanning old pictures, I came across these and thought they were fun, so low-res as they are I'm going to subject you to them...

Three Merten 40'mils, two Starlux and five Marx (30/35mm'ish) have a bash-about to 'Pax' or 'Yield' while five more Marx watch-on from the back, a mounted umpire (key-ring conversion) stands ready to intervene if the banter and joshing gets a bit heated!

The flat trees and shrubs are from a dozen or so makes including Cherilea, Jean, Manurba, and two Triang 'Battle Game' conversions, while I suspect the spray-painted one at the back left may have been rescued from a damaged snow-globe/shaker.

I'd also taken a photograph of the set-up for photography. These two were taken about the year 2000? You can see in the background I was supposed to be taking the pictures for the Giant Wild West articles for 1 Inch Warrior magazine, but clearly got distracted by shiny knights!

I would have been using an old 35mm Zenith with a macro lens and extension tubes.

That lamp was about 7-quid from IKEA, but it used to give me a splitting headache within minutes of being switched-on, which I suspect has something to do the the Asperger's as you wouldn't develop a bulb that resonated at a wavelength that gave NT's headaches; you'd never sell them, so it must be me!

Fond memories of the Old Holborn...on the 7th it will be a year since I started vapeing and I haven't had a 'fag' since.

M is for Macro

A bit of a test tonight, these are all taken with the new camera. My old Samsung, which had given sterling service for about two years to date died last week and with me having A) no money and B) a need for a camera last Wednesday, I couldn't get another Samsung, or whinge quickly enough to get a replacement from them. So having written Fuji Finepix off as being shite years ago after two of theirs failed me, I managed to find a cheepie on Wednesday.

These are taken with a Nikon compact - currently £49.99 in Argos. Like the previous three and following Moore's Law it is nearly twice the power of the old one and smaller, so from now on all (new) images will be around 16 Mpx. These also took a while to load but seem much clearer/sharper and the detail - when I get them in focus! - is in a different league.

Various Hover-flys, often mistaken by children for Wasps, they are mostly pretty harmless nectar eaters, with some of them having a rather horrid aquatic larval stage known as the 'long tailed maggot'. Other larvae feed on Aphids and look like shortened Caterpillars! Or; green hairy Leeches!!

More of the same, these are three standard House-fly sized larger ones and another (top left - Sun fly?) which was the biggest Hover-fly I've ever seen, it was the same size as a Hornet and that's what I thought it was as it buzzed my ear on the way into the Buddleia!

Little buff-beauties or whatever they are called, medium sized wild bees of the small colony type (50-odd to a few hundred individuals). The detail on some of these is fantastic and I'm wondering if they are worth anything to the image libraries? I take thousands of these types of shots and it would be nice if I could earn a bit of cash from them?

This is - I know - Bombus (probably 'lucorum' but with a buff tail?), our largest true Bumble-bee, and when it gets to it, it weighs the whole candelabra of flower-heads down, again the detail on these makes the thousands I have on disc from the last four or five years look poor!

This I am very pleased with, I have a vague memory of finding a red-tailed fly all dead, crumbled and dusty in an old web as a kid, but this is the first live one I've seen and I can't find it anywhere on the web ID pages? It's actually a crimson/vermilion colour changing to a more common green at the head end with a metallic sheen, the flash took some of its prettiness away! I don't even know which type of fly it is, I'm guessing on of the House/'Bottle', Flesh, Dung or Coffin flys, but several other groups have similar but less colourful members?

These were the first shots with the new camera and I was still getting used to it, the flash on macro is a bit too 'hot', but it takes better macro pictures without flash in good light so I may change the way I shoot figures...I've yet to try toy soldiers with it.

If you're thinking of a camera, or looking ahead to Christmas you can't beat this deal at Argos, 16 mega-pixels for 50-quid? Downsides so far - bright flash in macro, standard double-A batteries that may prove expensive over time and slow response on focusing compared to previous models. In a few years this type of 'compact-digital[ camera will probably have been replaced by smart-phone cameras of the same spec, so this may be one of the last?

I'm never sure of the rule re. names - common or Latin so have capitalised everything! I know it's a mess, it looks a mess, but I have Asperger's and it's only a Blog so I don't think anyone from Oxbridge will be harrumphing me down the phone first-thing tomorrow!

[Added 12-Sep.-2013] Turns out it's a North American Sweat Bee, and a less common one at that, must have stowed-away on a flying machine heading for Gatwick or Heathrow and flown along the M25 to Leatherhead! Or it might be one of these imports the tomato-growers are bringing-in to pollinate poly-tunnels?

P is for Pencil-thin...but Fat-legged!

These are currently very common on the roadside verges and in the hedgerows of this still remarkably green and relatively pleasant land. Watch the grass brown if this weather continues though! In a similar colour range to the Rose Chafer from bronze-greens through to grass-green, this is the Thick-legged (or Fat-legged) Flower Beetle (Oedemera nobilis), the leg thing being confined to the males.

These are the large daisy-type things - I don't know the name of - which line our verges and colonise waste ground, central reservations (medians) on motorways (highways/interstates) and the like, they look like Michaelmas daises but it's not Michaelmas!

These are all males and you can see where the name comes from, the upper section of the rear pair of legs are ballooned out.

Some more males, the other defining feature of these is the non-meeting of the wing casings, leaving a small section of the wings showing. One of the things I've noticed photographing beetles these last few weeks is how appallingly bad they all are at getting their wings back in order when they land, this species seems to have just given-up altogether!

The Females; these are all together more dowdy, less tapered toward the rear and lacking the fat legs of the male, still they can have a metallic sheen, it's just that I failed to get a decent shot. They also seem to make a better job vis-a-vis wing cases! Notice also that the one in the bottom-right image needed to take care - a very pale and quite well camouflaged spider was ever so slowly stalking her...