Beauty Queen
She laid her eggs in a mud nest she built in the wooden ceiling. Stocked it with a paralysed spider and sealed it up. In some time a young wasp will come out of the mud tomb to do what mum has done. Repeat herself.
Everything repeats, so far. It’s the essence of existence, to repeat what has been.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
A Little Colour
The Bee sleeps and the Aphid may be wary, instinctively so. How else could it be since they are not burdened with thinking or emotion. Wary is not emotion, it is an instinctive response of the body to the sense of danger the presence of an appropriate sized creature represents. Appropriately sized for eating Aphids.
Bees don’t eat Aphids but Aphids don’t know it.
*
Shiny green Katydid on the planet Frangipani with pink moon rising behind. Well, it could be a planet to an insect – the Frangipani tree. Didn’t stay still for long but long enough. Always enough even when the result is in the negative – no shot. What isn’t is imagination.
*
Grasshopper eyeing up the Marigold. They eat the flowers with a hearty appetite, must be the delicate beauty they are imbibing.
All in the sense of it and not a thought in the way? The long form of death.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Assassin at Work
I spy an Assassin.
Wandering about in the forest.
Tracked ‘im up the grass plant to panic in the hive.
Stabbed a wasp and carried her away.
And away.
And just when Assassin thought it was safe to stop the ants joined in the kill.
So off Assassin went again and didn’t stop till ants were way behind and wasp was drained of life.
This way and that, a little lost at times it seemed.
But never let go the precious hard won meal.
Skewered Wasp.
And the Assassin lived happily ever after. Until …
But that’s another story.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Nothing
It’s not a feeling, more an absence. A state that can easily be read as negative though even that can’t be sustained, since there is nothing. This nothing has no will in it and so it is a peculiarity, a singularity. Nothing is undivided.
We’ll see. Nothing?
*
I tracked this ant around for a bit and was given a few decent shots. I say given because it keeps me in my place, there is a greater power in charge. Just look at the next creature that appears, it’s mere existence is a miracle – never mind that ‘Take up Thy bed and walk’ stuff.
Just look to see, if you can. And there it is, the miracle of sense. No religion required.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
That Time of Year (Life?) …
… when it could as easily rain as shine. Not good news for the market business, but then there is no good news for the market business except it is actually covering costs, though not technically. Chandler is not the right market for my product but it’s the wrong time of year for making enquiries of the right market, everyone’s busy, too busy. Early new year I’ll try get on the Riverside market where people sell my kind of stuff, original works, prints and paintings, etc.
Maybe. The other point is there is not a lot of money about, or being spent. There is a world recession on after all, a lack of confidence in the future – who can blame them.
Then again it might just be time to pack it in. Can’t tell what’s next from where I am.
*
The red fly is from the rainforest, a particular spot where there were a few more of his kind. The red Hibiscus Harlequin Bug on the underside of a flower, also from the rainforest. The Squash? Bug chipping away at some hardened white bird droppings along with a posse of ants, must be the nourishment, also in the rainforest nearby. A Lady bug of some kind, hard to keep from blowing highlights with these fellows. Another bug I caught as it ran along a nearby branch, just one shot. And a humble fly, magnificent creatures.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
An Absence of Impatience
It’s Grasshopper time and the Crab Spider is enjoying the feast as it comes.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Flight Risk
This weevil was wandering around an aquatic plant in the nearby swamp. I got a few shots as it passed this way and that. It looked like it had something attached to its rear end. I couldn’t see very clearly at the time it had a problem with one wing. It seems one wing didn’t fold as the other obviously did. I suppose it could be a genetic defect though the creature looked like it had been alive for some time, though a defect is not necessarily a detriment to survival. It depends on the defect, doesn’t it?
I followed it around the big leaf it was on and it didn’t seem to be able to find a way to move on, explore as it seemed to for a track or trail leading somewhere. Eventually I left it where I found it, still wandering around the leaf. Not unusual behaviour for bugs, they don’t worry about things like, ‘I’ve been here before’, ‘am I lost?’, ‘what am I going to do if nothing to eat comes along?’
No such emotional nonsense for my little bugs. No siree.
I wonder if the weevil flew away ok? But not really, I don’t invite imagining I don’t need to do.
It’s a flight risk. Flight of fancy.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Out Of Time
It seems there is little time for writing these days. It’s not as if I am particularly busy – though it seems that way, except for editing the book and mounting and matting photos for selling, and walking in nature capturing images of all sorts of creatures. It’s more that what occupies me, making a go of the photo business, leaves little room for it lately. But it’s an exercise, isn’t it.
I have been finding some unusual creatures lately, unusual for me. But I want to do them justice, justice to their unique qualities, which all creatures have, but some more than others, to me, for now. :)
Here’s a few to be getting on with though. Each a magnificent expression of the intelligence of life on Earth. Each, however seemingly insignificant, essential to the whole. As it is with all things that be.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
A Few Creatures …
… lest I forget. These are some of the wonderful variety of the forms of life to be found at the places I go in the Redlands. The first is a young Nomad Bee, I believe, foraging.
A queen Ant looking to start a colony perhaps? Only one wing left so her options are determined.
A stilt fly on the orange peel out in the back yard.
Clown Spider? From Eprapah, under a leaf next to the red beetles.
An unusual fly.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click any picture and click again to enlarge
Nature's Place 
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