Atlantic Sand Fiddler Crab (Uca pugilator)

Cathy and I went out into the tidal march on the back side of Ocean Island late this morning. It was quite hot in the sun but it’s a cool place to be and I think we were both glad we did it. Hats and sunscreen were a must, though. I took a few pictures of a common egret (Ardea alba) and a few other birds. Mostly, though, we saw fiddler crabs. Hundreds of them. They would scurry away as we approached, disappearing quickly down their holes. If you stop moving for a while (sometimes a few minutes) they would come out again, as this one did. Of course I was lying down waiting for this one. It made it easier to be still but I ended up all covered with sand. This is an Atlantic sand fiddler crab (Uca pugilator).

Habroscelimorpha dorsalis (Eastern Beach Tiger Beetle)

I’ve already posted a picture for today and I don’t doubt that it will be the more popular of the two, but I wanted to post this one because it’s a new beetle to me. I’m sure I’ve seen them before, as they are fairly plentiful on the beaches of North Carolina, but I either hadn’t noticed them or never bothered to get close enough to take a picture. This is an eastern beach tiger beetle, Habroscelimorpha dorsalis, and it’s a lovely little thing, even if not the most colorful insect around. They skittered away as Cathy and I walked out to the eastern end of the island this afternoon and this time I stopped, moved in slowly, and bent down to get a few good pictures.

Pachydiplax longipennis (Blue Dasher)

In yesterday’s post I talked about going in the woods to the west of my office and that there is a boggy area. There is also a very old road bed that runs through the woods and at the south end of that, just before you reach the stream that runs betweem my building and the rest of the campus, there is a small, shallow pond. It is silting up but there is still a foot or two of water in it much of the time. It rained quite hard last nught so the water was high today (including in the creek, which I had a hard time crossing). I found a reasonably dry place to sit and took pictures of dragonflies for about half an hour. This is a Blue Dasher, Pachydiplax longipennis (thanks, Brady, for the identification, these dragonflies are too much for me), and a handsome thing he is, too.

Dem Bones

With apologies to James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), I present Dem Bones. In this case, they are (I assume) deer bones that I came across in the woods behind my office building. While yesterday’s picture was taken in the large lot north of my building, these were in a narrow piece of bottom land along a stream, to the west. I go down there now and then but much of the time it’s too we to walk through. With the heat we’ve been having I expected it to be dry but no such luck. It was mostly a boggy mess. These were just up hill from that and are probably the remains of a deer that was struck by a car but not killed immediately. It managed to get into the woods before succumbing to its injuries. Of course, that’s only conjecture. But there are the bones, regardless.

Harmonia axyridis (Multicolored Asian Lady Beetle)

I went out into the woods beside my building today. When I started working here this property (actually, three separate parcels totaling about 17 acres) was mostly a field with occasional trees. Even as recently as 2011, when I started taking a picture a day for my initial Project 365, there were more open areas than what I’d consider woods. Over the course of the last five years it’s really grown up into a young woodland. I came across a Micrathena spider today but had a hard time getting any pictures and none of them were particularly good. Then I saw this little lady beetle (commonly known as a lady bird or lady bug) and was happy to be able to get a few good pictures of it. I’m pretty sure this is a multicolored Asian lady beetle and that’s what I’ve put in the title. I’ll make a correction here if I discover he’s something else.

Dead Bumble Bee

Just over a month ago (June 24, 2016) I posted a picture of a dead wasp that I found on the floor of my office hallway. I liked the fact that I could get very close and use a long exposure (because it wasn’t alive and trying to get away from me) to get more depth of field than is usually possible with a live wasp. Today I was walking back from a meeting in another building and saw this dead bumble bee on the path. So, naturally (we’ve all done this, right?) I picked it up and brought it back to my office to get the ‘dead bee treatment.’ This exposure was 0.8 seconds at f/32.