Just …
Prehistoric creature, a shield-bug sucking on a vein – in a leaf. How they eat and drink.
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Mother nursing her eggs … then she cradles the young for a while. Nature … not so strange.
Give ’em an orange and they’ll come. The fruit goes off and gets staked in the garden. Habitat too, for some.
Huntsman in the house. A baby caught up on the carpet, stopped a while. Lucky to have all those legs.
Not an unusual sight in the house, often scooping them up for repatriation, before they smother in dust.
Out by the bee hotel, nesting on a tendril of fern hanging from above, about 5mm long these flies.
Plainly, some swollen bellies there, and this is mid winter here. The garden is maturing I think.
At rest late at night on the butterfly bush – what remains still flowering. One of nature’s sentinels.
Fly in the dark, they do … I try not to disturb them though, spider’s about. Robust little thing.
Made his bed on this twig night after night. A hoverfly … with a sense of belonging.
An other fly, also asleep at night but closer to the ground. Spikey little thing …
And a longhorn beetle, for its extra long antennae, laid back to its tail.
… when it looked like there was nothing left to shoot.
From a cold sparse season, a few hangers on.
Seeing into the wildness of nature.
Forms of ‘I’.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on those pictures for a closer look
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Bee Purple
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Colder and colder, fewer and fewer, the Blue Banded Bees are making a heroic effort at surviving. They also have the sense to shelter from the cold clear sky at night, hanging from a thread.
Literally, life on a thread for these guys. Always somewhere near the nest where the females would usually be. A few of them about the garden during the day.
Still some flowers blooming on our warm winter days, enough to keep a few bees fuelled up for their frantic paced flight.
Fly little fireball, to the end of … burn up the form with the passage of the sun.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on those pictures for a closer look
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Possum …
A little banana satisfies a prowling possum. She is wild but still feels safe enough to take from the hand.
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This ring-tail possum is more secretive, only showing up after the other and later in the night when food is gone.
She’s a tough little thing, solid muscle. You’d have to be to do the aerobatics she does on the roof at nigh and survive.
She waited for me to go before resuming her approach to a little food. It will take time to know her well.
And a little bread, wholemeal with grain and/or seed, no white bread and no sugar or other additions. Just plain food.
… the other one.
They come from above at night. One from across the road, travelling on the power line. Another from the roof of the house. Both are looking for food.
And since they are already here, and there’s no denying them – can’t evict the one in the roof and the other lives elsewhere – so I feed them on occasion.
They appear to be gentle creatures but they are also wild nature and not to be treated with carelessly. The grey will take food from the hand but the other is too wary – different treatment at home perhaps.
It’s one of life’s pleasures, attending the wild creatures, big and small. One of my pleasures.
We’ve got to give space to something besides ourselves, or they/it will all disappear.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on those pictures for a closer look
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Possum 2
Hello Possum … just looking for a bite to eat.
Yin and yang. The two principles of existence.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on the picture for a closer look
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Seasons End …
No fancy camera work, just what I could get without disturbing them. Don’t want to be the death of any this close to ‘winter’.
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These few are regulars outside the back door now, best shelter from the elements, rain, wind, cold night sky.
Proud little thing, comfortable being a bee, alert for non bee things in the cold dark night.
It’s usually the youngsters have the lighter colouring, smaller too straight from the nest, still coming …
I might set up some background during the day, before they come home to sleep. It might disturb them though.
It’s getting colder now and fewer plants are flowering hereabouts. Time’s up for many a small creature.
The Blue Banded Bee can be found sheltering from the cold dark sky under cover of the star jasmine, holding on to dried out stems.
They won’t give up, that’s not their nature. Come sunrise they will be away once more, seen doing what they do best, buzzing about the gardens nectar pots.
No worries about getting through the winter, no fear of death. None of that nonsense for the intrepid BBB.
Bee knows no psychological past so has no future, no imagination to stir emotion to be lost in.
Bee is what bee does, plus the power, of silence, of stillness behind.
Little beauty beeing.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on those pictures for a closer look
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Nature's Place 
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