macro photography – Brennah's Backyard

Mysterious Tiny Holes

I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to all the tiny holes in the sand around the seasonal pond area until little flickers of movement inside the holes caught my attention. (For some sense of scale in the photo, what looks like little pebbles are grains of sand.) They were only ever in my peripheral vision; whatever creature I was seeing was apparently very fast and skittish.

Unable to see properly what kept darting back into the holes, I eventually resorted to crouching over ones I’d seen recent movement in with my camera and holding very still… and waiting. I had to have my camera focused on the spot they would emerge before they came out as any tiny movement would cause them to disappear. After a bit of patience (and physical discomfort) I managed to get a couple clear shots of the heads of the creatures poking out of the hole… but they didn’t look like anything I recognized.

I thought they might be the immature form of some insect, but it took me quite a bit of searching before I managed to find something that looked similar… a tiger beetle larva! I don’t know how to tell what species of tiger beetle just from the head of the larvae, but it is quite likely that these were bronzed tiger beetle larvae, because I’d seen quite a few adults of that species in the same spot earlier that spring.

The other interesting thing about looking up pictures of the larvae was that I realized that it was just the head and thorax that is so well developed at this stage, and the rest of the body looks more grub-like. I had thought, looking at them in my pictures, that they looked like little ambush predators with those large mandibles (added to the fact that they didn’t ever seem to come all the way out of their burrows), and it turns out that’s exactly what they are. They pop out and grab passing insects (or other small animals), which is also why their front end is so much more developed at that stage. (The adults are predators too, but they chase down their prey.)

‘Very fast and skittish’ is also a pretty good description of adult tiger beetles, and this is usually the easiest angle to get of them… but I actually like how well it shows off the beetle’s markings!

Wasp Watching

The past year turned out to be a good one for getting wasp photos for me, particularly this past August. When the first of the goldenrod started to bloom these plants turned into magnets for pollinators of all sorts, but I particularly noticed a lot of wasps, not just in numbers of individuals, but in diversity of species as well.

Before that, wasps had been congregating on the spotted horse mint / spotted bee balm (both common names for monarda punctata) in the pollinator garden by the house. I was having fun seeing how many different kinds I could spot as well as just appreciating their many different shapes and colors… but as I realized going through them later, even some very similar looking ones turned out to be different species.

I wanted to show off in this post some of the wasp variety I’ve been able to photograph through the years, though of course what I’ve managed to photograph is just a tiny sampling of what exists (there are some truly wild looking wasps out there, of which I’ve managed to photograph only a few). Also some of these photos are ones I’m more satisfied with than others.

The northern paper wasp (polistes fuscatus) has a significant amount of variety packed into one species. Their varied colors and markings make them fun subjects, plus I was starting to notice what seemed to be the same individuals hanging out on the same flower patches each day when I was doing really regular wasp walks.

This is a type of oak gall wasp laying eggs in an oak bud. Oaks are hosts to an impressive number of gall wasps, as well as other gall making insects which is part of why oaks are considered such important members of their ecosystems.

five banded thynnid wasp on flat-topped goldenrod

The common name of this wasp is the gold-marked thread-waisted wasp (which sounds more like a description of the wasp than a name… but at least it’s an accurate description!) These are certainly interesting looking creatures, but I’m not particularly happy with most of the pictures of them I have so far. Fortunately they don’t seem to be a rare species so hopefully I’ll be able to get some better pictures at some point.

grass carrying wasp on flat-topped goldenrod

This tachytes wasp (a genus known as sand-loving or green-eyed wasps) was quite mesmerizing, with both the green eyes and silvery stripes on the wasp’s abdomen being very shiny and reflective. The stripes even seemed to change color depending on the angle and lighting. These were also fast moving wasps, which probably exaggerated the reflective characteristics and made the wasp seem to shimmer in the sun. It also made it that much trickier to get good photos…

The four-toothed mason wasp is a fairly common species, and I’ve photographed them before, but this particular little guy gave me the opportunity to get the best pictures I have of this species.

The same wasp (I have quite a few pictures of him).

bald faced hornet enjoying the goldenrod.

This wasp was so tiny you might assume it’s a fruit fly if you see one… and this isn’t even as tiny as wasps get!

Great black digger wasp on swamp milkweed.

This mason wasp (euodynerus crypticus) may not have a common name, and there doesn’t seem to be much information about them out there. What little I was able to find piqued my interest, though; apparently it may be a social wasp, which I hadn’t heard of in the mason wasp family before. In any case, this species was regularly visiting the spotted bee balm, so I got to see them regularly for a little while.

Some sort of ichneumon wasp on the back of my hand. I found this wasp halfway through December!

Many species of solitary wasps, like this rusty spider wasp, specialize in hunting a specific type of prey that they will cache in a nest for their offspring. In the case of spider wasps, they specialize (as their name implies) in hunting spiders. I noticed one of these wasps hanging around the entrance to the garage one day, and then she disappeared into the garage for a while and I lost track of her, only to later spot her dragging a huge spider out!

Black giant ichneumon wasp on a dead tree.

four-banded stink bug wasp excavating a nest in sand. This wasp is also named for what they specialize in hunting.

Great black digger wasp on spotted bee balm.

A close up of the black giant ichneumon wasp. These wasp are a challenge to photograph because they’re just so long. They don’t fit in the frame well.

Myzinum maculatum is another wasp that doesn’t seem to have a common name, but they are closely related to the other thynnid wasps in this post.

Common thread-waisted wasp. I think this wasp had an injured wing, sadly.

Great golden digger wasp on spotted bee balm.

Four banded stink bug wasp on flat-topped goldenrod.

I found this cuckoo wasp at a local park. When I’ve seen cuckoo wasps before they’ve been pretty skittish, so I was happy to finally find one that was cooperative!

This picture shows the cuckoo wasp (the same one from the previous picture) between my knuckles, which shows how small this one was.

I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of wasps I can find this year!

Algaescape

From a distance the green algae growing in the wet pondish area last spring looked kind of foamy and not very interesting, but through the macro lens it took on an entirely different character and I could see that the ‘foam’ was made up of tiny algae filaments trapping lots of little air bubbles. While I was taking pictures of the algae I spotted a tiny springtail just walking over the water which I made sure to get in some photos as well. It turned out I got a couple more springtails in my photos that I didn’t see at the time (it was kind of hard to see what I was doing much of the time anyway; I was leaning out over the water to reach the algae but I couldn’t really lean far enough to look through the viewfinder properly most of the time). I thought the results were super interesting looking, and I ended up returning to it to take more photos.

This springtail only appeared in one photo and, amazingly, in perfect focus (3rd photo is the uncropped version)

Hickory ‘Flowers’

In early spring when trees are just starting to leaf out, a few tree species have leaf buds that look quite a bit like flowers. Possibly the most dramatic example of this I’ve seen are the hickory trees (and the shagbarks in particular). Their buds can be quite large, which adds to the effect.

Ironically, the actual flowers of hickory trees don’t look nearly as showy as these buds; they have catkins and tiny, not very noticeable female flowers (which I haven’t seen since they’re high up in mature trees).

I first noticed this a few years ago now, but it wasn’t until a couple years ago that I was able to start getting some decent pictures. (It helps to have some young saplings that are easier to reach…)

The young, just unfurling leaves look pretty interesting too, with a layer of fur and tiny beads of what I think might be some sort of sap or resin.

I thought the leaves on this sapling were particularly pretty with the maroon color between the leaflet midribs.

This one is a close up (crop) of the previous picture.

Crab spiders like this one usually hang out on (or in) flowers, so it was interesting to see this one on a freshly opened hickory bud.

The outside of the bud is fuzzy and feels kind of silky if you touch it.

There’s always so much out there to discover at each time of year and things seem to happen especially quickly in the spring. You have to keep an eye out or you’ll miss it!

Ice Formations in the Mountains

Although it mostly wasn’t super cold while I was in New Mexico, there were still some interesting ice formations to be found in the mountains, particularly around streams. This was partly because it was colder the higher in the mountains you got, but also because the temperature differences between day and night were more extreme there.

This is what happens when a waterfall freezes (partially, anyway). Though you can’t really see it in a still photo, there was water flowing a bit behind this wall of ice.

This is the center of the waterfall in the previous photo. It was still flowing through the center, but there was a chunk of ice in the middle of the flowing part that looked a bit like an explosion of ice, which was causing the liquid water to splash around pretty wildly. It’s kind of hard to tell in this photo what water is frozen and what water is just in active motion.

This one’s a close up of the wall of ice in the first photo.

I think this picture has interesting contrast with the smooth, rounded ice and frothy bubbles.

These icicle-like formations were on the underside of a log over a churned up bit of river. I’m guessing they formed from the spray of the river running to the bottom of the log and freezing before they could drip back down.

I found these tiny ice formations on twigs after climbing up the same rock where I also found some of the lichens in my lichen post. I was pretty excited to find these, since I haven’t seen any ice formations quite like this at home. When I found these, and for quite a while afterwards, I wondered what the conditions were that made it possible for these to form. Recently, I stumbled across something that may be an explanation.

Certain ice formations occur due to specific interactions with plants or fungi. I recently learned that there are a few different plant species that create ice formations when their sap freezes and bursts out of the sides of the stem, which is actually sort of what appears to be happening in this picture in particular… But on the other hand I wasn’t able to find information about any of these plants being in New Mexico. It would help if I could see this spot during the summer.

Another angle of the tiny ice formation.

Tiny Felt Leaves

One spring I was fascinated by these tiny, just-emerged oak leaves I found on the many oak saplings along the edge of the woods. To me they looked like tiny felt crafts. They were actually tiny enough to be tricky to photograph.

Bright red, fuzzy leaves don’t seem to be a characteristic of any specific oak species; they could have to do with environmental conditions, but I wasn’t able to find much information about it. Plus, I don’t know if what I found was talking about leaves that were as tiny as the ones I found. They certainly grew out of their fuzzy red stage extremely quickly.

These leaves are only a couple days older than the others and still quite fuzzy but they only have a hint of the red at the edges of the leaves.

The undersides of a couple leaves just emerging from the bud.

I was able to spot bright red leaves like this again this past spring so I do know it wasn’t just a one-year oddity. I’m pretty sure at least some of these are burr oak, but it’s hard to tell for sure what they all were at this stage and there may have been multiple species with leaves like this. (I’m pretty sure these are all from the white oak group, though.) I’m still not quite sure yet how common this might be, but I could see it being easy to overlook, as tiny as the leaves are and if they’re on mature trees they’d be up well out of sight.

Last Aster Standing

Back in 2021 we started some native wildflowers from seeds. Since they are perennials they didn’t really fill out until the next year, though a few plants produced a scattering of flowers in their first year. One of of the species we planted was the aromatic aster. I chose it because it was supposed to be an especially late blooming and drought tolerant species (we’re mostly in a wetland, but had one dry area to plant) and by early November of last year it was the last aster still blooming. (To be fair, the most exuberantly blooming plant was in a favorable spot for soaking up late day warmth, and nicely mulched, which does help extend the growing season.) It was also one of the last few flowers blooming in general, so not surprisingly, it attracted the attention of all the remaining pollinators and concentrated them in a small patch of flowers. In particular, the asters were covered in bumble bees.

It was pretty easy to get some good pictures of the bumble bees since there were a whole bunch of them and they didn’t seem at all concerned about having a camera right next to them.

So many bees concentrated together in this patch sometimes led to bees foraging in close quarters…

These two got a little too close, and are trying to fend each other off here.

This little halictus bee also wasn’t too comfortable with having a big bumble bee wandering up behind him.

Another halictus bee resting on a flower. She hung out on this flower for quite a while.

There were a couple of drone flies hanging out in the midst of all the bees. Drone flies are a type of hover fly, also known as flower flies (and both names are quite accurate).

After the encounter with the bumble bee this halictus bee decided to groom himself and have a little rest, giving me a particularly good opportunity to take his portrait.

There were a few of these tiny, colorful agapostemon bees darting around. They’re tricky to photograph because they’re fast, but I noticed they would pause and rest every once and a while, so I managed to get a couple nice pictures of them.

Autumn Leaves

I was really enjoying photographing the Autumn leaves last fall, and I wound up with quite a lot of leaf photos. Here are a few of them.

Most of the time the leaves on the blackberry brambles turn to a deep red or purplish color in autumn, but they don’t usually do this. This one plant I found at the edge of the woods has some sort of almost variegated look to it’s leaves.

An elm leaf I found in the driveway and held up to the light to photograph. Elm leaves have cool patterns in the serrated edges of the leaf and the leaf veins that I like to photograph. I’m not sure where this leaf came from though, because there aren’t any elms near the driveway.

This sassafras leaf was still on the tree when I photographed it. I wasn’t sure at first if I wanted to try to get one of the large dark spots in the picture, but then under the macro lens it was kind of reminding me of a sunspot so I decided I liked it.

Sunset Spiderweb

One evening recently while I was in the woods, I noticed some spiderwebs being backlit by the setting sun. As it turns out, my newer lens works great for spiderwebs, and after taking a couple fairly standard head-on pictures, I started experimenting with the angle. I didn’t have very long to work with this scene, though, because the sun was only illuminating each web for a few minutes (there were three webs that I found). I would have enjoyed more time with this subject, but I was happy with this photo.

The Many Moods of Prunella Vulgaris

Heal-all (also known as prunella vulgaris as well as a bunch of other names) is a common plant, and I frequently walk past it any time I’m out and about. Sometimes it catches my attention and I take pictures.

The flowers are probably the most likely part of the plant to catch someone’s eye (and yet this is the only picture of the flowers I picked to share). In this case it was the neat ring the flowers were arranged in that got my attention.

This is heal-all in late December. Recognizing plants in winter when they’re dormant adds an extra bit of challenge. This photo I like because of the water droplets inside the dried flower structure.

This one (taken on the same day as the last photo) shows a part of the plant I thought was pretty cool looking. It seems to be sort of like a shelf at the base of the flower cluster.

This one was taken in late summer and shows the flower cluster after it has dried up.

It’s interesting to see how different plants change throughout the seasons and which ones catch my attention in the winter.