Find cool little bitties of nature around your place of dwelling
Take photos
Post photos!
Here’s mine!
On Sunday, it was a rainy day. The nice, melancholy kind of rainy. I waited till it slowed to a light drizzle, then went outside. First thing I noticed was a cedar bush which had been populated by funnel web spiders. Most of them were squeezed tight in their little funnels, but this guy seemed to be enjoying the rain.
Here’s a shot of another part of his web. It was purty.
I spotted a cool shelf fungus growing on a gnarled old tree. It was pretty big! This stack was a good 2 feet high, and the widest shelf was at least a foot.
Getting closer, I noticed a little maggot on one part. Do maggots eat fungi?
I saw another maggot then, and another. The falling things and little pats coming from the branches weren’t raindrops, as I’d thought, but maggots. They were leaping. Mainly at me. I didn’t stick around to see where they were coming from.
But here’s a shot of another fungus on the other side of the tree!
Pretty! Someday I hope to get a digital SLR. I only have a little point-and-shoot Fuji with limited macro function. I do have an old Miranda SLR which has got to be pushing 40 years at this point. It has a crazy bellows extension for macro shots, which works pretty well, but it requires a lot of light. The camera is also way past overdue for a good internal cleaning - little bits of fuzzies can be seen through the viewfinder.
My flower album is mostly stuff from my back yard, as well, but there are flowers there from Bok Tower Gardens, Englewood, North Carolina and many other places as well.
Thanks to the near-daily rainstorms we had for a good part of the summer, we ended up with itty bitty little mushroomsgrowing in our lawn.
And here’s a shot of the spider(species unknown) that guards my tomato plants. It’s hard to tell just how big he is in that photo, but trust me when I say he’s pretty freakin’ huge - his abdomen is around the size of a peanut. There are several other spiders of the same species lurking around in our garden, though thankfully most of them are much smaller.
Sami leaves uneaten seeds? Sunshine would never do that.:pThe squirrels share a feederwith the wild birds. (No squirrels in the picture, though–just the feeder.)
My ex is a photographer who works often in his vegetable garden. This picture he made with a macro lens of a spider who is sensing with his legs if he can climb over the camera. Or he is threatening the camera, hat is also possible, I’m no expert on spiders.
We need lynn42 in this thread. She makes pictures of the wildlife in her yard for a book on spiderphobia and how to overcome it.
If you ever find out what kind of spider that is I’d love to know. I have one exactly like that guarding my patio door and it occasionally likes to hang, face level, in the dark from the top of the door. It started out in the spring as a normal sized spider and then it just got huge! It’s both disgusting and fascinating at the same time.
