A couple of Pond creature photos, taken with my aquarium set up a while back. Both of these are under 1cm long and required the use of extension tubes for grater magnification. First up this Haliplus water beetle larva. And a couple of phantom midge larvae close ups
A couple of photos from one of dragonfly chasing lunch breaks. As well as the migrant hawkers, there is an abundance of ruddy darters at Wat Tyler CP. I’ve seen many tandem egg laying pairs, but they move pretty fast as the male whips the female down to lay an egg. I took a few…
Some photos using my aquarium set up. One of the few species of the small dytiscid (diving) beetles you can identify without a microscope is Hyphydrus ovatus Unfortunately, like all small dytiscids, they don’t sit and pose for long, and it took my quite a while to get these photos of this 5mm long beetle.…
Last Friday I had a go at photographing a southern migrant hawker (Aeshna affinis) that was flying around an gap between some reeds and some hawthorn. This meant I could get away with using my 100mm macro. Therefore this images are quite heavily cropped. I spotted a southern migrant hawker on Monday but didn’t get…
At lunchtime I bumped into a couple of folks looking for the southern migrant hawker (one of who was Simon NL on Flickr, click his name to see his excellent pics). I got a couple of photos of the perched male today: Sadly with my Sigma 150-500mm rather than my 300mm prime, which I can’t…
There were a few people in Wat Tyler CP today looking for the Southern migrant hawker dragonfly. If you are unfamiliar with this species see my last post. Today I was unable to use my long lens so didn’t get any more of it in flight, but at the end of the day I got…
In 2010 a number of Southern migrant hawker dragonflies (Aeshna affinis) turned up at Hadleigh Country Park, a few miles East of Wat Tyler CP. They also turned up at Vange Wick (not Vange Marsh) just to the south of Wat Tyler CP, so I’ve been hoping they would turn up here. Last year, I…
A few photo from Wat Tyler CP during the recent sunny spell. First up a ruddy darter. This wolf spider was warming her egg cocoon in the sun. And this lizard posed for a photo… …before playing peak-a-boo.
I’m a bit of a pond dipper, as some regular readers will have worked out, but there is one species that has always eluded me, the water stick insect. This year I saw a preserved specimen and a captive one (which I never managed to photograph), but never before had I seen a live wild…
More recent photos from Wat Tyler Country Park. This time a female emperor dragonfly which was laying its eggs on some fallen reeds. This angle, although a bit top down, shows the tip of the abdomen in action below the surface. And I tried an in the environment shot too.