Category: Summer

A Great Day In The Great Marsh

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A marsh is a great place to be in the summer, so long as you don’t mind the humidity and biting/stinging insects swarming all over the place. Personally I am not a fan of the humidity but it is more than worth tolerating in order to enjoy the biting/stinging insects and the plants they feed off of, like the Canada Lilys pictured above. All photos are from a recent hike on the Great Marsh trail in the Indiana Dunes National Park.

Queen Anne’s Lace has a very photogenic structure to it’s flower. It pays to explore it from multiple perspectives, head on being one of my favorites due its symmetries.
When Queen Anne’s Lace is in full bloom it has a tiny red flower in the very center. This little spot of red is one of the features which distinguish it from the very similar Poison Sumac, which is quite a nasty plant. Placing the camera almost level with the flower and setting a fast aperture allows you to create a narrow band where the image is in focus.
Although this trail has plenty of hard biting Deer Flys, this Flower Fly just slurps up nectar from wild flowers. Look close at the head (you can click on the image to view it full size) and you can see the extended proboscis which appears like a long snout.
This beetle has beautiful metallic greens and blues, complemented by a splash of red.
Here we see 5 caterpillar or maybe moth larvae munching on this leaf. I have no idea if these are considered to be good caterpillars or destructive ones.
Something you will find in abundance in a marsh are Slugs.
Tall grasses and reeds abound in marshes, including the horsetail that surround the puffy seed head of some other plant.
While there are certainly lots of stingy things in marshes, the big old Bumble Bee is not one of them. They have no stinger. They are also incredibly difficult to photograph because they are in constant motion. Even when feeding on a flower they are in a constant state of frantic motion. Maybe they are just on a permanent sugar high from all that nectar they drink.
And finally, we have a genuine stingy type. Wasps appear scary, but as long as you are not bothering them they have no interest in stinging you. They only use their stingers for hunting and self-defense.

The Fly’s Eye

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You’ve heard the phrase the Bee’s Knees? Well this post is about the Fly’s Eyes. The eye’s of many insects are fascinating to look at up close. Flys in particular have some of the most interesting and down right beautiful eyes in nature.

This is a photograph of a Hoverfly which was hovering about a foot above the sand on the Dune Ridge trail in the Indiana Dunes National Park. It was taken on a bright and very hot afternoon in June at a particular spot on this trail which I know from past visits is a good place to find Hoverflys in the act of hovering. Getting a clear photograph like this is an interesting technical challenge which I will touch on in an upcoming post. For the moment however I just want to focus on the beautiful eyes of this cute little Hoverfly.