All Sorts …
… from the garden and beyond. Some creatures are only ever seen once, or stop only long enough for one shot. These are a few of those.
If you’re into macro it pays to let the garden manage itself as much as possible. It may take time but it takes time for life cycles to establish and creatures to emerge, whatever the season.
Plant them, feed them, prune them, move them but otherwise let things be as much as possible – whatever you do don’t poison them, if you can help it. Works for me.
Creature of the darkness … Longhorn beetle, favoured the dried out stems for a few nights.
*Click the pictures for a bigger version – the better to see them.
Ant takes time out of its solitary patrol to preen. A few seconds and it was on its way again.
Assassin Bug nymph, shelters under the red flower during the day and hunts at night – lately.
Plant Hopper, looks all bent but it may be moulting – a long time at it.
Click Beetle up on a leaf in the dead of night, shows up once in a blue moon.
Male Lynx spider, caught a fruit-fly meal on a decaying lemon staked in the garden.
Teddy Bear Weevil? Soft and gentle looking. On a post in the car park of the local rainforest remnant.
Bluebottle in the garden, they don’t stop long at all for a shot.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on those pictures for a closer look
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Life On A Lemon
Him – with the longest front legs, on a lemon.
*Click the pictures for a bigger version.
Her, on an orange.
It on my finger. Every time I tried from the side it turned away.
She is actually laying beneath the skin here. He appears to be guarding, attending her.
It got crowded on the lemon after a while.
Alone at last.
Oh, oh … here comes trouble.
Two males fighting over a female, antennae and legs flailing. Not the best but the only shot.
For a change, she appears to seek him out.
These little things, about a centimetre long, are living out their lives on an ageing lemon in the garden, on a bamboo stake. They are attracted to something about the decaying fruit, mold, fungus or/and other qualities not discernible to me.
They live on similarly decaying oranges, and the occasional banana – I have a veritable orchard staked in the garden, all good fun – just to attract the faeries from the bottom of the garden.
Did you know the faeries are insects? Yes, that’s the form they take. And some take no sensible form, preferring the fleetness and relative safety of the insubstantial. Each has its advantages.
The point is though, these creatures of story are in your garden too, if only you look to see, and not to judge. No need for any psychic nonsense either, they are detectable by the senses.
And the wonder of it is sense makes more sense, no nonsense.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on those pictures for a closer look
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The Last Bee
Before : resting undisturbed.
Click on the pix …
Bigger than she looks.
Not a comfortable mouthful for a night-time predator.
And after : back to sleep.
Definitely the last Blue Banded Bee for this year. I have been trying to provide enough for her to survive but I think the cold may get her in the end. I even have a white bowl out with a blue sponge in the middle of it soaked in sugar solution, like a giant flower, so she doesn’t have to fly far first thing on a cold morning to fuel up – haven’t seen her take it yet.
The shots were taken in the dead of a cold night with a reflector under her, so there was less shadow below. It was just a piece of paper attached to the lens by elastic, a bit clumsy really but it worked to a point. I bumped her with it and she protested by spreading her legs that way, as if to say ‘I’m a bigger mouthful than I first looked, and you could choke on my sharp pointy bits’.
They do that when disturbed at night, if it’s cold enough that they don’t fly off to the light, make themselves look bigger. Many creatures do it, cause themselves to appear bigger than they are, or an uncomfortable mouthful, until the threat is gone.
It’s a working strategy people also employ when feeling threatened. Nature … it’s our nature after all.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click on those pictures for a closer look
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Rare Visitor …
… to my garden. The Neon Cuckoo Bee lays her egg in a Blue Banded Bee’s nest and the BBB provisions it for the NCB. This may account for an apparently hostile relationship when both approach the same roost at sundown, maybe not. Maybe they just squabble over top spot on the grass stem, as the BBB seem to do amongst themselves.
Either way she is a real beauty, black and blue set against the yellow flowers. No complete body shots, she was too busy feasting, but nevertheless a treat for the observer that sees, that resonates in a place in the uncontaminated psyche where nature comes from.
A pleasure to me.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click those pictures for a closer look
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Macro Walkabout …
Of course macro is fun and interesting and I get to meet people I otherwise wouldn’t but it’s not the most important thing I’m doing right now. Something else comes first.
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The first two pictures are from the garden before Andrew arrived and the rest are from the surrounds of the local water treatment plant, bordering remnant rainforest and extensive mangrove swamp. On the edge of the wilds you could say.
There were more creatures to be found in a couple hours than I had thought possible given the wild weather we have been getting lately, so wet and windy. But that’s nature, you never know what amazing little form of life is coming up next.
These are all native insects that have a function in the essential nature on our doorstep. The nature can’t do without them and we can’t do without it, we are it.
Native bee foraging in the flower and keeping out of the wind for a while.
Patterned Flower Beetle looking for somewhere safe. I helped her to a flower where she loved some nectar.
Botany Bay Weevil sitting out the storm and unconcerned by the flash.
Little Red Beetle and Plant Hopper passing.
Passed … There’s fire in those eyes.
Assassin Bug, a juvenile I believe. Hunters all …
Bug on a Seedpod.
An older version perhaps, on an older Seedpod.
Jewel Bug against the sky. Lively little things.
Sandpaper Fig Beetle found only on the Sandpaper Fig tree.
Tiny Black Jumping Spider. Excitable little fellow, he’s a male.
Golden Spiny Ant, a Queen I believe. You can see where her wings have recently dropped from.
Colourful Leaf Beetle taking its time …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click those pictures for a closer look
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And Then There Were …
The Botany Bay Weevil didn’t notice Xmas coming and going. It was all just time passing, the sun rose and set and in between they did what they do.
Feeding, flying, f…… and posing for photos when the cameraman comes along. Can’t keep a good weevil down. But no, no personality involved at all, of the Weevils.
To capture two together is a rare event, signifying … only that they do …
That’s the fact.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click those pictures for a closer look
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Gypsy Spider …
She’s back … At the beginning of September this year I went out into the garden to have a look around, it was near enough 1.00am. There hadn’t been much to shoot and it occurred to me to take the camera with me, not unusual that.
And there she was, the first place I looked, sitting in meditative pose atop a small daisy bud. A tiny ghost spider, bright against the dark of the night.
Since then she has come and gone across the garden, from daisy to butterfly bush to sunflower, chia, coneflower and round again. Through torrential rain, baking sun and howling winds …
Every time I see her she has grown, and every now and then I come across pockets of young crab spiders, some hers I suspect. Some numbers dead in a tray under one of the bee hotels.
Currently she is resident on the yellow butterfly bush, one leg missing and bolder than ever – age and experience showing. She lets me get very close now without much sign of alarm or resistance.
I trust she lives a while longer, fulfilling her purpose of nature’s intelligent instinctive desire, albeit unconsciously, and we will meet again in the garden.
All the good is in the garden, or the garden is all the good, an other time and place … inside.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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What A Feast …
… the garden is. In more ways than one, I know.
To the senses a delight, of colour and form, scent and texture. Then just a little closer and …
… nature knows no pity, no sentimentality, just survival and reproduction. Only the fittest, the fastest, the craftiest endure.
And the wild formless intelligence behind it cannot be denied, while no thing, no body, lasts longer than its time.
I had a dream … that turned out to be a nightmare.
Now I don’t dream any more.
And the dream goes on.
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Noble Visitors …
It’s another record year, never been 2015 before, as far as we are aware.
And in the garden it’s been another record, but who’s counting … I can’t help noticing the increase in variety and numbers of insect visitors, especially now the butterfly bushes are flowering and a few years work with the soil is bearing fruit.
It is said the Stag is a noble beast – I remember that from somewhere. Maybe it comes from the old English kings practise of hunting them, they had to be noble for kings to hunt them …
But really, kings are just ordinary men dressed up. Every body is of noble blood, all god – whatever that is – made. And the antlered beetle is no exception.
All god made things, and all things god made. To exclude one is to invite conflict to the mind.
Try maintaining a prejudice, a psychological position, without some conflict appearing.
As within, so without. And nothing is absolute, both ways …
© Mark Berkery ……. Click a picture for a closer look
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Nature's Place 
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