The Bailly Calumet trail in the Dunes is a really nice trail. Part of it follows the Little Calumet river and it can get pretty buggy. Turns out that most of the spring wild flowers have come and gone, so the bugs were the star of the show on this day.
Never seen anything like this before. His left wing was stuck on a bit of spider webbing, and he was kicking around pretty frantically so it was hard to get a clear shot. It is so white and translucent that getting the exposure right was tricky as well. The camera wanted to expose for the whole scene which was mostly much darker foliage, it is situations like this I have begun shooting in manual exposure mode more often. After I finished photographing him I gave the underside of the leaf a tap and set him free…
… but in doing so I probably deprived some poor spider a nice meal. The world is pretty brutal when you are a bug.
WOW! Now those are some impressive legs. For scale its feet cover an area about twice the size of my hand.
I like the orange coloring on the legs. These guys were all over the place.
This fellow looks like he lost a fight with something. He is not having a good day, but he’s still doing way better than the next one…
…Yeah, that’s gotta suck. Well at least for the victim, the spider is probably a pretty happy camper right now.
Daddy long legs. While they are Arachnids, they are not spiders. They are also very beautiful up close.
This is both an Arachnid and a spider.
This one is real tiny, but was very still and did not fly off while I was setting up to get this shot. All of these photos were taken with a long focal length macro lens which allows you to get good magnification without having to get so close that you scare off your subject.
A Golden Backed Snipe Fly.
Although this guy is green, he is not exactly blending in with the background. Another very small insect, but very easy to spot due to its iridescence.
Ok I’ll admit, I like bugs but this one is just ugly. Looks like a stink bug, except for the big hind leg so I am not really sure. They were all over the place, often clumped in twos and threes.
Wolf spider. I caught it stalking another insect nearby, but I think my presence caused her lunch to take off at which point she ran off, probably pretty pissed at me.
