Up close and personal, this cucumber beetle larvae looks like a hyper-spiny ankylosaurus or other prehistoric creature. I don’t know what type of wasp is on the brown eyed Susan, but it’s quite colorful. The last photo is purple cosmos backlit in the early morning light.
The hummingbird moth seems to flutter its wings in slightly different patterns from the ghost images of its buzzing wings.
Better known as a Camel Spider, the Sun Scorpion seems to be something between a spider and scorpion, but it’s neither. They are solpugids, of which there are 50 species in the southwestern US. This one was in the catio and about 1 1/2 inches long, but they commonly reach 6 inches in length and can supposedly run at speeds up to 10 mph. They eat insects, small lizards, beetles and scorpions that they catch and kill with their jaws, as they are non-venomous.
A blue damselfly landed close to me, and I noticed it was eating an ant when I got it in focus under my macro lens.
A sweet stag beetle…
Giant hornet buzzing in on a chitalpa.
I call this black dragonfly a “Night Fury” because I had been trying to get a photo of it for over a week — it had not let me get close enough to it until I climbed into the bamboo patch just before sundown and waited for it to land close enough to focus on it. The other two dragonflies in this series were very cooperative, as usual, but the Night Fury refused to land anywhere in the open outside the bamboo patch.
A black and yellow dragonfly showed up. It was timid at first, but finally let be get close enough to get some clear shots. There was another dragonfly that looked to be all black, but it never let me get close enough to see what color rally was.
I’ve read that besides their voracious appetite for aphids, Ladybugs have an average of 400 different sex partners over their lifetime. Besides Ladybug love, many other insects were pollinating the flowering plants at Desert Harbor Retreat.
Following the ducks is a bit of “macro madness” — I found various interesting critters in the iris and roses. While I was out moving hoses to hook up drip systems, this female mallard hopped up on the neighbor’s wall. Then she hopped back down, and I could hear her making little quacking noises. When I looked over the wall, she was marching off with four ducklings in a row behind her.
Our roses are starting to bloom and the ladybug larvae are working on the aphids.
Off Center & Not Even 