How to Photograph Six-spotted Green Tiger Beetles

Here's a pair of six-spotted green tiger beetles.

They are mating. Click to enlarge,

I usually notice these beetles in areas that are clear of brush, like dirt paths, roads, and even sidewalks. They run along very quickly, glittering like little Christmas ornaments, while they search for their arthropod prey. My typical encounter with a green tiger beetle consists of seeing one, following for a moment while I try to focus on it, then snapping a blurry picture just before it flies away. Is the secret to photographing them becoming obvious? Find a pair that are distracted while mating and snap away.

Bumblebee on Buttonbush

 

A bumblebee on a "honeyball" of tiny flowers of the native North American buttonbush.

Bees, hummingbirds, moths, and butterflies visit the shrub, which is also a host plant for several kinds of moths. This bumblebee is collecting nectar while spreading pollen among the blossoms, a good deal for both the bee and the bush. Click to enlarge.

I recently heard this African proverb: "When the bee comes to your house, let her have beer; you may want to visit the bee's house some day."

Squirrel Cookies!

 

A few weeks ago, I wrote a blog about white squirrels in the city park in Olney, Indiana. Click on this sentence to see that post.

When I was in Olney, I visited the souvenir shop and bought this squirrel-shaped cookie cutter. I promised to show off any future cookies.

Here they are. This is a group of pink-eyed albinos.

And here are some with pigmented eyes. Their white fur is the result of a non-albino genetic pathway, which is equally delicious in cookie form.

White Fringed Bog Orchid

 

The lovely white fringed bog orchid is blooming in the New Jersey pine barrens now.

I found a little group of them last Thursday. They were just as the poet, Joseph Pullman Porter, said they would be in his poem Wild Orchids: "Under the pines near a murmuring brook..." Click to enlarge.

To celebrate the sighting, a poem by Wendell Berry, from Given Poems, Sabbath II:

"I dream of a quiet man

who explains nothing and defends 

nothing, but only knows 

where the rarest wildflowers 

are blooming, and who goes, 

and finds that he is smiling 

not of his own will."

Sunday Morning Walk in the Pine Barrens

 

I took a walk in the pine barrens near Chatsworth, NJ, this morning. It was hot but lovely.

Some of the old cranberry bogs were full of fragrant white water lilies. Thousands of them. Click to enlarge.

Some of the bogs were full of clouds.

 The sky is twice as pretty that way, but it feels a little topsy-turvy. Like going through the pine barrens looking glass. 

Dead trees loom from some bogs, like the masts of sunken ships.

The working cranberry farms have red pumping stations and wide open spaces.

This gnarly old tree was up to its knees in a blue bog. Like an Ent on vacation.

Fabulous scenery.

More fabulous scenery.

And a tiny toad. I think it's a fowler's toad, one of many that were hopping along the paths today. This one is so small that it could sit on a dime and not hang over the edges!

Here's a picture with a ballpoint pen for scale. The cutest tiny toad ever, right?

And here's an eastern painted turtle. Check out its pretty orange trim. 

The New Jersey pine barrens. Close. Free. Full of beautiful and interesting things.

Harvester Butterfly

 

Behold the Harvester butterfly! Click to enlarge. Its wingspan is just over an inch. It has black and white ringed antennae and white-ringed eyes. It sits with its wings closed over its back, so we see the underside, which is orange-brown with darker spots edged in faint white. This is the first Harvester I've ever seen, although I have been looking for years. The small, uncommon butterfly is famous for being the only strictly carnivorous butterfly we know of. In its caterpillar stage it eats aphids, scale insects, and treehoppers. Female Harvesters lay eggs in colonies of these insects, so when a little Harvester caterpillar hatches, it is surrounded by tasty prey. 

The Harvester was sitting on a low branch overhanging this pretty pond. Nice place he's got there, eh?

Fruit Week

 

I spent the heat wave picking fruit. As usual, I remembered strawberry season just as it was about to end. Click to enlarge. 

But I got to the field in time for the last of them. It was hot, though there was a breeze and I wore my shade-making straw hat. I always process fruit on the same day I pick it, to preserve the just-picked goodness, so this all got washed and hulled and measured into bags and frozen to make jam with later.

Then it was time to pick sour cherries.

They are my favorite fruit to pick because they are so pretty. Looks like a tree full of candy, doesn't it?

I pitted cherries for hours...

And, because I was running out of room in a freezer already half-filled with strawberries, I preserved a bunch of little jars of cocktail cherries in lightly spiced sugar syrup. These are as delicious as they look.

Then I noticed that red raspberries were already mid-season. Raspberry is my best flavor of homemade jam, so I headed out to another hot field.

I put raspberries through a food mill to remove the seeds. That took hours, but at least at home in the air-conditioned kitchen. So, phew. Fruit week snuck up on me and was the hottest week of the year, but it was a big success.

When the heat dies down a little, I will begin to make jam. Here is my jam jar rainbow from a previous year: strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, peach, plum. All the jars above have been eaten. They were wonderful. Looking forward to this year's.