Season’s End
Summer is winding down from the piercing white light and stifling humid heat to cooler blue grey rain with occasional cold, if it can be said Brisbane ever really gets cold. Autumn is here. The colours change. There are fewer creatures to shoot but the ones there are also slow down with the temperature, as I do. It’s a seasonal thing, everything is.
The Dragon, herald of change and action, came and went according to its season, is still here in lesser numbers and no less beautiful. The Grasshopper, local symbol of success in leaps and bounds, filled the gap between the waves of Dragons. And Flies, Caterpillars, Moths, Wasps, Flowers and Spiders all take their place in the multidimensional sense of my life.
There is a time to move and a time to stay, a time for yes and a time for nay. Who knows which is which till its done? Not I. For sure. Though I see it coming, inside, where it hasn’t taken form just yet. Nonsense to some I know, but not to me. Everything has its season, even the unknown, the invisible. You see?
Flood, storm, rain or shine. On the black screen of mind. Whatever may be.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Dragon’s Return – Red Lace Queen
They didn’t really go away, but they have been showing up more again on my walks recently. One in particular has been sitting still for me, if you could call it that in a swirling and gusting breeze. Down by the water, out in the bush, on an old dead tree branch sticking in the ground, a red beauty has been perching.
The first day it took a few minutes before she was comfortable with me having slowly edged up close and standing there next to her. Two feet away, close enough to get some good shots. It is the habit of the dragonfly to flit from the perch to chase down prey, anything small enough to eat, usually that also flies. She came and went for hours it seemed.
It is also the habit of the dragons to chase each other, and sometimes eat each other, as I have seen on occasion. Every time she came back it was face into the wind, naturally, to land. Then she would reorient herself so she was facing me, the best she could, the wind was strong at times. However the wind was blowing I remained on the sunny side, more or less.
When I moved left or right to get an angle shot, or more of her in the light she would move so she was facing me. So I got a lot of head-on shots. Eventually she gave up this con-frontational behaviour and went about her business as usual, with me now to be accounted for in her terrain, naturally.
*
A few days later I went walking there again and saw her perched on the same stick from ten metres down the track and as I approached she turned to me. We said hello, I did anyway. It didn’t take much time at all for her to become accustomed to me this time, a matter of seconds. She recognised me and knew no danger in the event.
Then she was off, chasing this and that on the wind. Returning to perch in front of me and facing into me again. I played this game with her for a while, dodging to the left and right to get the shot, and it worked out.
I met a beautiful creature and she met me, in silence, a rare exchange, and it resonates in me still.
Dark queen, wild red wind.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Rose – A Simple Pleasure
When all is said and done it’s the simple pleasure of being that matters, without the trouble of mind.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Mother Nature
It’s called a money tree – the leaves you can see, by someone, way back when I can’t remember. Where the wasp has started building a nest, a paper wasp, a paper nest. She is alone in the endeavour and there are at least three cells of the hive occupied so far. I have seen the little grub she leaves in the cell, a tiny thing about two millimetres long. And she spends a lot of time away from the hive, probably hunting food to put in with her young, her little babies. Food entombed in sensational paralysis to be eaten as needed, alive. My magnificent nature.
Whenever I go to have a look at the nest she fronts up and eyeballs me. Stands up tall, spreads her wings and ‘rattles’ her front legs at me. She is serious about her young, and dangerous if disturbed. But she won’t waste the energy harassing me if I don’t give her good cause by disturbing the nest. I wonder if she will get used to me, maybe one of the young will be my friend? I don’t think so somehow. Not these wild creatures, their instinct is too basic, no facility for socialising. But who knows, there are exceptions. Watch this space.
Isn’t she magnificent the way she poses in defence of the hive, the beautiful instinctive intelligence to survive in form rendered as a bold defiant stance, against all comers. And that she never has a doubt about what she is doing, no wasted thought, no wasted energy. All her energy going to what she is designed for, to live as wasp and reproduce, against all comers. Magnificent nature.
The fact is I see this, perceive this, in me. Inside. I re-cognise this part of my nature represented in the wasp. It is my nature, since I came ‘up’ through the species, the instinctive psychic structure and not just the appearance in sense. And it is still a part of me, a part of my nature now, in my psyche. The beauty of it is in recognising it I see the being of it, me being that, before thought gets in to distort and make something else of it.
It is wasp and, as clear as my attention to it is, I am being that, in the moment. When ‘that’ is not I am, being, no problem. The best I can. The same goes for any other nature I cognise, when thought or emotion doesn’t get in the way there is only ‘that’.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Beautiful Black Bee
No Grasshoppers today, though there are plenty to come, maybe.
I was out exploring some local bushland when I came across a single flowering plant. It was the focus for many flying insects that didn’t sit still for a moment, and then this black bee came along. It visited one flower after another and if I hadn’t been ready with settings on the camera it surely would have passed me by without a proper hello.
It is possible to plan such a shot and execute it, if you have nothing else to do. But I think too much is made of the photographer, after all if the nature doesn’t show up it’s just a camera with no pictures.
Apart from the technical information required to know what to do with the camera in any situation or lighting the one thing that sets a snapshooter above the crowd is vision. Inner vision, that makes the shot before it is taken.
So it is with any endeavour, clear intention and focus gets me through. As clear as possible, as long as I persist. Whoever ‘I’ am.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Black Wasp
Edited 13/12/16 – for clarity only. Text and pictures – from when I started macro – remain as then, 14/4/08.
I noticed a jet black insect with two bright yellow antennae crawling through the grass in a hurry at dusk yesterday. A wasp, looked like. About three centimetres long. I bent to have a look and arrived at ground level just as the creature started to make its way up a blade of grass.
The grass was only six inches long but it was off the ground and relatively safe. The wasp seemed agitated and I thought it was out of place for it to be in the open as the sun was going down. So I went to get the camera for a better look.
On close inspection it was obvious what was the matter. An ant had a grip of the side of one wing. Chances were it couldn’t fly with the ant’s weight throwing it off balance and ruining its aerodynamics. And it was getting dark.
The ant had only one thing in mind. I have left bits of fruit out for these ants, to get a closer look. But they are not interested. They prefer meat.
*A word about these ants. They are only tiny, maybe three or four millimetres long, but they have Herculean strength. I have seen just a few of them pulling the body of a big fly a hundred times their own weight along the ground, relentlessly. They are everywhere around the house and I have come to respect them as the cleaners. They tidy up everything they can use, anything dead – or alive, moths wings left over from the frogs dinner, anything. I have even seen one take on a jumping spider – and lose. But they are numerous, untiring and capable of phenomenal effort.
As I started snapping I noticed the ant on the wing wasn’t the only problem. There was another one attached to one of the black wasp’s feet. The wasp was swinging and shaking its leg while keeping it at a distance from its body.
If a second ant were to get on its other wing it would be a goner for sure. How did the ants get on it in the first place? The wasp must have stumbled into a stream or swarm of ants for two to get such a hold of it. It did well to get away with only the two hangers on.
At the top of this blade of grass, for the next few hours, I witnessed a mighty struggle indeed. A life and death struggle. The wasp couldn’t turn its head enough to get at the ant on its wing but this was the greatest threat so it focussed its attention here while keeping the other at a distance.
Without flight the wasp was surely dead. I watched it perform all sorts of manoeuvres to try to dislodge the ant but for a long time nothing worked. It turned every way around the blade of grass and, eventually, by design or fortune, the ant was dislodged. I didn’t see it go.
But I did see it being eaten, in pix six, seven and eight. Where the wasp is standing up on the tip of the grass, an almost triumphant stance. But the fight wasn’t over, in fact it raged on for ages. There was still the one on the leg which couldn’t be ignored.
He wasn’t going away just because he was on his own. I shot it all from every angle trying to keep it all in focus, in the dark, by the light of a dying torch. I tried different things to highlight the action but the fact is I couldn’t see what I was getting until later.
Out of a couple hundred shots I got a few reasonably good ones to illustrate the event. I think so. In pix nine and ten it is obvious the wasp won out and in the morning there was no sign of it. I assume it flew away on its own business.
In the end the ants had taken on more than they could handle. At least one of them paid with his life. The one on the wing. I suspect the other went the same way.
The little ants don’t give up and run away. The wasp was persistent, and stronger in the end.
Nature's Place 
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