Zooming – October 2016

I got a new camera this month and have been doing some experiments with the increase optical zoom (that also translates to increased digital zoom. I’m sharing some of my favorites in the Zooming post for this month. There were two pictures of milkweed bugs from early and late in the month. There are at least 4 instars of the insects in the ‘leaf’ picture and fewer in the second picture. Maybe it is getting late enough in the season that there are not new milkweed bugs hatching from eggs.

I like the zoom for photographing insects because I like not disturbing them. It’s even more important for insects that sting like the bee on the asters

Or the wasp that seems to be looking underneath the milkweed leaf.

Sometimes it just works better because the insect will fly away more quickly if I get too close – like this bumble bee.

Sometimes there are items that catch my eye because they seem to be spotlighted – like this fall leaf stuck in other vegetation that seems to glow in the morning sunlight.

One morning before I was scheduled to hike with first graders I heard a noise high in the tree above me and I finally spotted the noise maker – a squirrel gnawing on a black walnut; it takes a lot of work to get the nut inside.

I don’t photograph my cats very often. They don’t like cameras….but staying further away and using the zoom was effective – once.

Walking in Brookside Gardens

I’ve already posted about the serendipity and the catbird from my walk in Brookside Gardens last week. There were plenty of ‘normal’ scenes that I enjoyed too along with quite a few people walking the loop around the gardens. Here are some highlights:

The white wash is still on the conservatory. It’s there to help reduce the heat of summer inside but is washed off once it gets cool enough in the fall.

There are still flowers blooming.

And the seed pods of the magnolias have their bright red seeds (they always remind me of red M&Ms).

Some of the leaves are beginning to turn but most are still green.

I’ve been reading so much about the rusty patched bumble bees that I’ve started paying more attention to all bumble bees (this was is obviously not a rusty patched)!

Caster plants have maturing seeds. I always notice these at Brookside because one of my grandfathers always had a few plants in his garden.

The Tea House was empty as I walked by…the pond cloudy with sediment after recent rains.

Some of the ferns had spores on the underside of their fronds.

My last stop of the morning was in the conservatories. They were just setting up the mum displays --- and none were blooming enough to photograph – yet. I’ll go back in November. Along with a lot of gardeners working the garden, there were also people putting up lights already in preparation for the display beginning around Thanksgiving.

Brookside Gardens – June 2016

I had guests over the past two weeks and Brookside Gardens is one of the places that just about everyone enjoys. We got their early enough to be part of the first group into the Wings of Fancy butterfly exhibit. The butterflies inside were pretty much the same as we saw in late May that that I posted about early this month. I did get to see caterpillars for the black swallowtail. I had them on parsley growing on my deck a few years back – so many of them that the parsley was demolished!

There were insects in the gardens that were active because the day was already warm: dragonflies like the garden rooms that include a water feature and

Bubble bees seem to be everywhere.

There was a mockingbird that made lots of noise from the pinnacle of a small tree.

Every bush in the rose garden seemed to be blooming.

I like the ones that seemed to glow from within in the bright sunlight.

A succulent has been planted in an urn where it was blooming and spilling over the side.

The early summer flowers were at every turn.

The tadpoles near the Tea Garden pavilion were huge – about 6 inches long. since the tail was still so long I wondered how long it would be before they made the transformation to frogs.

The native dogwoods are already done with blooming for the year but the Asian ones were still in bloom. I liked the soft pink of one so much that I took a lot of pictures of it. My three favorite images are below.

Milkweed Update

A few days ago the milkweed flowers were still only buds. Now they are blooming and the insects are very active around them. The smell very sweet to human noses too!

I have seen several types of bees – the very large bumble bees

And the smaller honey bees and native bees.

There are other insects as well – did you note the ant on the flower in the first picture?

There are bugs on the leaves too. The one I noticed yesterday – and identified via a web search – was a Pennsylvania leatherwing beetle or goldenrod soldier beetle. The yellow ovals on the ends of its legs are aphids!

Unfortunately – I can’t find any Monarch caterpillars. I hope we have some that hatch and survive when the Monarchs arrive from Mexico since the early ones seem to have all perished. I talked to a third grader that had been in a class where they tried to raise Monarch caterpillars this spring and she told me that most of their caterpillars died because they were infected with parasites…and that it seemed that the stripes of the ones that died early were more wiggly than straight (i.e. they looked different than the caterpillars that survived to make their chrysalis and eventual emerge as a healthy butterfly). I don’t have a large enough sample size for comparison but from now on I’m going to photograph every caterpillar I find so I can do some comparisons with photographs.