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.
*
Old walls crumble, new horizons appear.
© 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.
*
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
Creatures of Divinity
While the appearance of insects is reduced in the fields and forests because of the cold, the cold sends a few to the light I leave on outside at night. So I get to see some creatures I wouldn’t otherwise.
It really is amazing the design of this beautiful existence, seen in the small natural things. Not by any ‘BIG’ Christian sort of God person but by the impersonal that is beyond the reach of thinking, reasoning, emotional Man. The impersonal that can be ‘seen’ when there is no one to go; ‘there’ it is. It just is, in all things, and out. That’s being, or being divine.
*
As for being human, a pained, thinking, emotionally interpretive creature that concerns itself with trivia and dies slowly and uncomfortably over a long period of time?
Who, in their right mind, would want that? And when seen to be utterly futile how to turn it to purpose.
We’ll see, is all I can say.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Sweet Bee
A Fire Tailed Resin Bee, lovely little thing. Found a few metres from the Mantis nest. It was slow moving and in an effort to get it to stop altogether I gave it my finger to rest on and warm up, it was overcast on a relatively cold day. As soon as it climbed on it started moving faster and in a few seconds was stretching its wings and away it went. So much for it stopping for a better shot.
A bee is a bee, until it’s not. But it never has a problem being a bee. A man is anything the wind blows along, until he’s not. And man can have a problem with being anything, because it’s not the truth. Anything at all, because existence is an alien place.
Man must come to the will to act without it being born of want or not want if he is to avoid more of the same, being without truth. The action carries the imprint of its birthing and imbues the consequences with it.
Or it could be the wind of change just blows through him, we’ll see. Or we won’t, because death is the whole point of living.
We’ll see, if there’s enough pain to change him.
Smile! You’re on candid … (:
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Ichneumon Wasp – Laying on Mantis
First picture is just for size perspective. The Wasp is 3-4mm long and the ovipositor is thrice as long, standing on a one inch diameter Mantis nest, a globular foamy thing you have probably seen before.
The Wasp is parasitizing the Mantis nest, or Ootheca, by first sensing with her ovipositor, smell or taste – just like us, there is something there to feed her young – every mother is concerned for the welfare of her young. The Ootheca is where the Mantis lays her eggs and they incubate. The wasp has another idea, instead of hunting something for her young to eat and building a nest she does it easy and lays in a ready made nest, the Mantis’s.
She was so occupied I was able to manipulate the grass she was on to get the shot; otherwise she would probably not have let me close. Most of these small creatures are single minded when it comes to fundaments such as eating, shelter and reproduction. And unlike people they don’t make a problem of it, don’t get emotional or worrisome. Just doing what it is moved to do or must, no spanner of thought in the works.
The Mantis nest is one inch in diameter and five feet up on a stem of grass in a field of grass and there is nothing to brace myself or the camera for a shot. This is what I use the stick for, amongst other things. But the first thing is to go still inside. Inside comes first, if I am still inside I am still outside – as much as possible. The value being I am not distracted by thoughts of anything but what matters to getting the shot. And what matters first is stability, of posture or platform, or focus – the inner then the outer. When I quiet my mind this way it also means I am less likely to get anxious or stressed in the often difficult process of capturing the image.
When I have stability of focus – as much as possible – I accommodate the fact there is no perfection standing in a field trying to hold a camera at the top of a five foot long stick absolutely geo-stationary – it’s not possible. This is where the minute but inevitable movement has to be controlled since it can’t be eliminated, even with short working distance and lens and bug relatively stabilized in the same hand, so I move the plane of focus – less than 1mm deep – through the plane of the subject at the angle I want to capture it and shoot just as I judge it is where I want it. And it is a judgment for me. With my gear it is sometimes like shooting in the dark but you can see from my pix it works, and the keeper rate is not bad.
And if this old body can do it with my cam any body can.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Domino Cuckoo Bee
This little beauty was trapped in my bathroom recently for long enough to exhaust itself trying to get out the window. It was literally out of energy, couldn’t rise an inch for a second when I gave it some honey on a leaf and it fell into it and over on its side a few times. So I helped it out, keeping its tongue in the honey. After a short while supping the nectar it was renewed enough to clamber about until it flew off through the opened window into the garden.
A little nourishment is life to small things. Don’t give grudgingly. Or be true and don’t give at all, even if it means poverty, death or insanity. Relative terms, I know.
To be true to what you are is more important than anything else. For if you are not true to what you are now you can’t move on to what is truer, can’t change.
And change must be.
*
Oops! Did I forget to smile just then. ((:
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
A Most Unusual View
Many times I have been shooting a fly that was rapidly rotating its head and every time missed it on the upturn. This time I saw it was rotating but left the fact out of my consideration re the shot and got it three times with one and six frames separating them. The originals look much better.
You’ve got to be a bit lucky. And surrender to the fact.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Magical Bee
An hour or so before sunset I was in the garden looking for anything settling down for the night. It was early yet but if you don’t check you don’t know. I wasn’t looking for anything this small and when I saw it at first I thought it was a mite or some such since I saw it from face on and there was just an indistinct head and two tiny antennae waving slowly, drab and uninteresting to the unaided eye. It was roosting unusually early on a dried stem at the edge of the jungle of grass and plants the side of the garden is.
It’s a solitary bee, meaning it’s not unusual for them to be roosting alone. The amazing fact is it is only 3mm long, tooth to tail.
What a beauty. What a wonder. What a life.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Nature's Place 
6 comments