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which_chickI am not really sorry. It's odes season and I am very enthused. I know that it's not everyone's cup of tea to hear about odes all the damn time.
Non-odes update: The guinea hens have been moved to the big chicken coop with the Marans.
Non-odes update: Roses are blooming, but not Chuck just yet.
Non-odes update:
This is a Roundleaf Sundew, a carnivorous plant found in the swampy bits up at the end of Kutz's creek that used to be a beaverpond and now contain an assortment of Interesting Odes.
Different odes have different habitats. Mostly I've been plunking around the pond (a ~40 acre impoundment in northern Fulton County, PA, not Cowan's Gap) doing the pond species. But that's only about half the odes we have. So today I took a walk back up behind Kutz's to the old beaverpond area, which is swampy and soggy and sphagnum mosses and sundews and home to an assortment of interesting odes as well as some Phragmites and ferns that, NO LIE, grow tits-high on me. They are enormous ferns. Seriously, they are fucking huge.
There are also a lot of sedges, which will be WAY MORE INTERESTING for me once I get The Sedge Book (Carex: Sedges by Mohlenbrock) which is apparently pretty darned authoritative for PA despite being about Illinois.
But anyway, I was there for the swampy-bits odes and the woodland-stream odes and the Not-Found-At-Ponds odes. How'd that go?
It was awesome. I would like to show you some "in the field" shots to illustrate why I frequently net these guys and take pix in-hand for ID purposes. Hint: It's not because I am being mean. The odes are released unharmed once I take pictures of them, even the small ones.
Here is a Great Blue Skimmer. He's a large light-blue dragonfly with a white face, kinda hard to miss. He's in the middle of the picture.
This is a Brown Spiketail. He's a dark-brown and bright-yellow feller, which you would think would show up really well against a green background. But no.
So yeah. While I can see the dragonflies in question, it's a hell of a lot easier when they look like this:
Great Blue Skimmer
Brown Spiketail
These are not small or inconspicuous odes. They're highly visible. And still, with the Canon Powershot, they're invisible blobs even after an image crop from 9 mb to 3 mb (because 9 mb takes forever to upload to Imgur).
So that's why I do in-hand shots... at least that way you can see the damn bugs.
When the bugs are smaller or ACTUALLY inconspicuously-colored, that's a whole different ballgame. Look, for example, at the Southern Pygmy Clubtail. The name "Pygmy" should give you a clue, but if you're having trouble with scale, look at how large my fingers appear compared to the species above.
The Southern Pygmy Clubtail is a new record for my county. So go me!
Non-odes update: The guinea hens have been moved to the big chicken coop with the Marans.
Non-odes update: Roses are blooming, but not Chuck just yet.
Non-odes update:
This is a Roundleaf Sundew, a carnivorous plant found in the swampy bits up at the end of Kutz's creek that used to be a beaverpond and now contain an assortment of Interesting Odes.
Different odes have different habitats. Mostly I've been plunking around the pond (a ~40 acre impoundment in northern Fulton County, PA, not Cowan's Gap) doing the pond species. But that's only about half the odes we have. So today I took a walk back up behind Kutz's to the old beaverpond area, which is swampy and soggy and sphagnum mosses and sundews and home to an assortment of interesting odes as well as some Phragmites and ferns that, NO LIE, grow tits-high on me. They are enormous ferns. Seriously, they are fucking huge.
There are also a lot of sedges, which will be WAY MORE INTERESTING for me once I get The Sedge Book (Carex: Sedges by Mohlenbrock) which is apparently pretty darned authoritative for PA despite being about Illinois.
But anyway, I was there for the swampy-bits odes and the woodland-stream odes and the Not-Found-At-Ponds odes. How'd that go?
It was awesome. I would like to show you some "in the field" shots to illustrate why I frequently net these guys and take pix in-hand for ID purposes. Hint: It's not because I am being mean. The odes are released unharmed once I take pictures of them, even the small ones.
Here is a Great Blue Skimmer. He's a large light-blue dragonfly with a white face, kinda hard to miss. He's in the middle of the picture.
This is a Brown Spiketail. He's a dark-brown and bright-yellow feller, which you would think would show up really well against a green background. But no.
So yeah. While I can see the dragonflies in question, it's a hell of a lot easier when they look like this:
Great Blue Skimmer
Brown Spiketail
These are not small or inconspicuous odes. They're highly visible. And still, with the Canon Powershot, they're invisible blobs even after an image crop from 9 mb to 3 mb (because 9 mb takes forever to upload to Imgur).
So that's why I do in-hand shots... at least that way you can see the damn bugs.
When the bugs are smaller or ACTUALLY inconspicuously-colored, that's a whole different ballgame. Look, for example, at the Southern Pygmy Clubtail. The name "Pygmy" should give you a clue, but if you're having trouble with scale, look at how large my fingers appear compared to the species above.
The Southern Pygmy Clubtail is a new record for my county. So go me!
