Fly on Mushroom – Yum!
With the afternoon sun streaming through the trees, and after a few days rain, the mushrooms had pushed their way through the settled soil and grass. Not a lot of them, but enough to notice. And some bugs noticed too.
This fellow had commandeered the cap of this one and was chasing any intruders off with a virtuosity, perfect flight control. It is a pleasure to watch such mastery of the wing at work and play.
Have you ever seen bugs at play? Have you noticed they do?
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Bugs are not the dumb creatures they are often taken for. They do have their own simple intelligence, according to their form and function. Not unlike us people. They sense, and in their way they know what they need to know.
Chase off that intruder. Need for a pee or a poo. Time to eat or sleep. And time to mate. And die, just like us.
And there is always that ‘something else’ that may emerge. A little creativity perhaps. A little god. Just like us.
In a flash of colour and form, or graceful dance. A little beauty.
Just like us.
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Unlike us they don’t have or make a problem of any of it.
Intelligent little bugs.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Surprise Surprise
Usually I can’t get near these before they are fluttering away but I looked down and there it was, a butterfly, still pumping up its wings. It was only just born a butterfly and must have climbed up on the blade of grass that gave it some isolation while it fully came to its butterfly form. So I said hello and took her picture. She didn’t mind.
While I was doing that a Jumping spider came along and performed for us. Turning this way and that, a little dance of nature to entertain while the hard work of cramping down for the shot was undertaken. It’s ok to say of a spider : Sweet little thing. Delightful character. Wonderful nature.
Evidence of its recent moth meal in the scales on its ‘fur’, here and there.
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It’s no coincidence what appears as nature since it is my nature appearing. The order of things is from inside to ‘outside’. So when a butterfly shows up where none should be I take notice and allow the simple acknowledgment of what it is symbolic of, new form, new life.
Let it be.
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For two days the same kind of butterfly has been under the outside light, just sitting there. And now it’s gone. I suspect a hungry Gecko got it, judging from the disturbance beneath its last position – flowers and holders upturned.
What does that symbolise then?
Everything has its time.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Cold Cold Sun
The weather in Brisbane is lovely this time of year. Now the run of rain has more or less broken, the sun is warm and the wind is cold. It is winter here after all. Although this means there are much fewer creatures about to photograph it is a welcome break from the summer’s heat, naturally.
The light is still bright but I don’t have to squint to see and walking in the nature has fewer hazards, such as the mozzies – still here, only fewer.
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Some small creatures are still attracted to the light at night and the flowers beneath it. Truly wonderful creatures, yet so easily overlooked. And it is so in their most colourful clothes their lives are shortest. A brief flowering of form, to do what must be done – this is existence after all, in preparation for the death that inevitably follows.
It could be seen as sad but that’s not so. Death is not the end we think it is. An end, surely, to all that sense – colour and form. But a new beginning too, for life inside. Existence is a tunnel of events and circumstances and it only requires that it be traversed, with an eye on the greatest value, whatever that is for one – you or me. No morality please.
And the greatest value is to undergo the effects of existence without the holding on that just makes more effects that then have to dissipate or die. Surely? That’s being new, being now.
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Death on my mind? Only in passing.
Passing what must be passed.
A little death. ((:
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Mason’s of Old
It’s ‘not’ just one more example of our own true nature, where we come from and how we do what we do. These wasps are known as potters or masons, for their working of mud to make their nests. One of our oldest building materials to provide for our oldest need, shelter or protection from the ‘elements’.
These creatures handle this material with a mastery, in their way. They will find a source of water with nearby suitable earth for mixing to a malleable consistency for their structural needs. Little mud huts or domes, or nests where they lay their eggs to give their young the best chance of survival they can.
They are a wonder to watch and it’s wise not to get in their flight path. Like most creatures they have their habits and anything that interrupts the pattern is subject to scrutiny. Habit has the advantage of when it is broken the attention or intelligence is alarmed to the fact, something’s out of line. Some habit is a good thing.
And when the mud has done its job and the young wasp breaks out it breaks down again to become once more just a part of it all that is available to the whole for whatever need. It’s another of the sustainable practices of nature that we have distorted in our search for security and permanence. But everything ends, even our steel and concrete ways.
Mason wasps never get stuck in the mud, inside or out. They never hold on to any notion of security, based on some fear for the future borne in the past. And some don’t emerge from the mud nest.
Stuck is not an option. Dead is ok. Free is better.
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Old walls crumble, new horizons appear.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
A Dark Winter Sunshine
May be a strange title for a post written in Brisbane, Australia, but it is what is perceived that counts. The cold has settled on the nature here and the small forms of life, the bugs of all kinds and sizes, have all but disappeared. That doesn’t stop me going out since I do so for the simple pleasure of being in nature, first.
It doesn’t always work that way though I am always reminded. How could I not be, it being so integral to my experience and knowledge of what is of value in spite of predispositions and other forces at work in my life. What I do is the best I can since it is what I do. I refrain from judgment one way or the other, and surrender to none. And every action has consequences.
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This metallic green beetle is one of the last of its size to be seen for now. It lives on a small Eucalypt tree by a creek and there are still a few yellow daisy-like flowers around it. Any shot of it on the tree would probably result in some black background so I brought it to the ground and placed it with one of the flowers reflecting off its shell, as you can see.
As the big green beetles diminish in number the larvae have been increasing, in size and number. It’s an opportune time for the larvae since there are fewer predators about that could injure their chances of survival, the parasitizing wasps for instance. Though where there is food there is something to eat it.
Where there is up there is down, obvious but fundamental, to intelligence.
I would have neither, the up or the down, the here or there, the then or now.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Hide and Seek
Anthropologists say that in every culture in history children have played the game hide and seek. And we’re still at it one way or another. ((:
I would say you can often see the simple way of things in the uncomplicated nature around us. The instinctive intelligence of it without the interference of thought or emotion arising from past experience.
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Here’s a Jumper that’s at it too, the seeking part anyway. I knew he was up to something, posing as he is in the first two shots, and deliberately looking at the ground where there is nothing in particular to see.
Tall – ish, dark and handsome.
In the next two he has begun signaling with his two front legs, holding them out and up and waving them about.
Then I saw her, the object of his attention. A little tan beauty.
Introductions made and he’s away and wooing, and she’s talking back – a good sign.
Chasing her this way and that.
But she’s giving him plenty of opportunity to demonstrate he’s serious, that he really loves her and he’s not just a fly-by-nighter.
And he persists against all rebuttal and abandonment.
Juliet, Juliet, wherefore art thou running my love?
“It’s only me!” He called. As he pursued her off into the leaf litter.
The end, as far as we know. ((:
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Visitor to the Mantis Nest
The Mantis nest had a couple Earwig visitors ‘listening’ at the surface the other day. Or so it looked to me. The same nest the Ichneumon Wasp was parasitising. No rest for the prey here it seems.
They both took different positions and stopped as I watched, I got the impression they were ‘sensing’ for signs of life that might mean food. It’s odd to see two earwigs together at the top of a five foot stalk of grass. I suspect the wasp did the same in its way, sensing for signs of life – food for the young – with the ovipositor before planting her eggs.
Now what does that remind me of? Dinner time anyone?
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Nature's Place 
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