Another Day at Work
Apis Workers' Party
Predator
Some of Your Beeswax
Sedum Bumbler
Look of Defiance
Chicory Bee
Bumbling Bees
Garden Cafe
Buzz By Here - To Infinity and Beyond
Pick Your Poison
Blind Side Attack
On a Mission
Honey Bee on Sedum
Covering the Cosmos
Center of the Cosmos
Three's a Crowd
Popular Spot
On A Pedestal
Big Harry Fireworks Display
To Impress the Girl
Different Perspective
Sweet Ride
Perfect Little Piggies B&W
Flipping the Light Fantastic
Festival of Flights
To the Crowd's Delight
Amish Go Round
Wondersome One
The Stars In Her Eyes
Tuesday's Child
Sleeper Hold
Considering the Next Move
Sugar and Spice
Front Porch Portrait
Caged Competitor
Early Adoration
Child In the Ligtht
Stroll Through the Weeds
Attention Grabbing
Eye Contact
On the Line
Eyes of Wonder
Rounding the Curve
Troubadours of Basin Spring Park
Down by the Creek
Sun Day
Catching Some Light
EAA Fireworks
Hear Me Roar
Leaf
Over Purple Clover
Even the very simple and common can be a work of beauty. While walking through the woods in NW Missouri I came upon this solitary stalk of purple clover blooming. It was early spring and about the only thing blooming in the woods.
Purple Clover is also commonly called Red Clover. According to North Carolina State Extension…
The common name for Trifolium pratense, Red Clover, can be confusing as the flowers are more a pink to pink/purplish, not a true red. It is grown as a forage crop for pasturage and hay for livestock. It is a nitrogen-fixing plant and is often grown as a cover crop to improve soil fertility. Its native habitat includes fields, pastures, meadows, waste areas, and along roadsides. It can be found in grassy locations that are not regularly mowed.
It can be easily distinguished from other varieties of clover by the large pink flower heads as well as the chevrons that appear on the leaflets.
Its flowers have a honey-like fragrance. The foliage can produce a pleasant clover-like scent. The flowering heads and foliage are both edible, both raw or cooked. Its young leaves should be harvested before the plant flowers. They can be used in salads or soups or cooked similar to spinach. The flowering heads as well as the seed pods can be dried and used as a flour substitute. The young flower are also eaten raw in salads.
It has also been widely used for athlete’s foot, constipation, ulcers, corms, and menopause. Red clover contains isoflavones. The edible flowers taste sweet or like hay but they are not easily digestible. Do not eat the flowers if pregnant or nursing.
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Sunflower Superstar
I purposely lined up this shot so the afternoon sun would be hidden behind the sunflower. That sneaky summer sun still found a way to crash the party.
These are sunflowers growing in the farm field behind my rural Wisconsin home. They are very tall; over my head in most places. The fields around our house are usually planted in wheat, oats or corn. It’s always cool when sunflowers make it into the rotation.
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Yellow In Season
A sight for sore eyes. These sunflowers will brighten up anyone’s day. These were found blooming in a farm field in northeast Wisconsin.
This is actually a field of sunflowers that surrounds our rural home. Simply breathtaking when if full bloom. Watch for more photos to come.
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All of the photos I post are available for purchase. If you’d like to buy one, click on the blue “Buy this Online” bar below for a variety of print and frame options or contact me for digital purchase and licensing options.
Designer Dots
The seven dots adorning this large butterfly caught my eye while studying the amazing winged creatures at the Butterfly Palace in Branson, MO.
I have no idea what kind of butterfly this is. It might be easier to identify if I had a photo of the upper side of the wings. Most identification guides seem to show the butterflies with wings open.
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Fern of Fancy
This fern, found in the woodlands of northeast Wisconsin, was in the final stages of unfurling. In the spring these ferns sprout from the ground and go through the process of spreading their highly divided leaves.
The delicate curl you see at the ends of the fronds will soon straighten out. These ferns can quickly take over an area of forest floor when they are growing in favorable conditions.
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All of the photos I post are available for purchase. If you’d like to buy one, click on the blue “Buy this Online” bar below for a variety of print and frame options or contact me for digital purchase and licensing options.
Soft Touch
This is a flower that seems to bloom backward. The flower head is pointed down (notice the downward direction of the buds to each side) but the petals turn up. This plant is part of the Cyclamen genus.
I’d like to tell you that I took this photo of an exotic plant in some exotic foreign land but, alas, it was taken in the kitchen of our home. I was working on my camera, making micro-adjustments to the focus of my various lenses. It’s a process of fine tuning the auto focus function to account for the minor differences in lenses. Even lenses of the same brand and model can have minor differences. The camera will focus each of them the same so focus could be off…usually just a bit and mostly unnoticeable, but still off. Of course, we’re typically wanting a very precise focus on most of our images so tweaking settings to get it as close to perfect is a worthwhile endeavor.
So, after making my micro-adjustments, I just snapped a few photos to test the focus accuracy. This is one of those test shots. The plant is one my wife keeps on a cabinet in front of a window in our kitchen. I focused on it, taking advantage of the pleasing green of our lawn outside the window as the background. Of course, the lawn is out of the range of focus so you’re not seeing blades of grass; you just see a solid green background. You’ll also notice a kind of cross-hatch texture in the background. That effect was created by the window’s screen.
Sometimes, if your looking, you’ll find “interesting” and “exotic” in the most common places.
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All of the photos I post are available for purchase. If you’d like to buy one, click on the blue “Buy this Online” bar below for a variety of print and frame options or contact me for digital purchase and licensing options.
Carnival of Autumn Color
The wide variety of hues in this patch of sumac reminded me of the bright colors you might find at an autumn carnival.
I had a few minutes before I had to be an an appointment so I thought I would make a quick stop at a local waterfall to, hopefully, catch a beautiful fall scene. Well, the waterfall didn’t have much water falling; barely a trickle. Even if it were flowing, there wasn’t much color in the foliage surrounding it. However, there was a small patch of sumac in the area that was bursting with color. Normally the sumac turns a bright red. I’ve not encountered sumac in transition with such a wide range of colors before. It made my stop worthwhile.
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All of the photos I post are available for purchase. If you’d like to buy one, click on the blue “Buy this Online” bar below for a variety of print and frame options or contact me for digital purchase and licensing options.
Dark Damsel
The dainty damselfly is a predator by nature. Damselflies catch and eat flies, mosquitoes, and other small insects. Often they hover among grasses and low vegetation, picking prey off stems and leaves with their spiny legs.
I think the best part of this image is the detailed pattern and color in the wings. I also like the tiny spines on the legs.
This dark damsel paused just long enough for me to catch a good photo. They tend to zip to and fro and make focusing a challenge. I saw this one on a walk through some woods in Missouri. I had to shoot through the leaves to grab this image. I would have preferred the leaf in the foreground wasn’t there so you could see the structure of all the legs, but sometimes you have to take what you can get.
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All of the photos I post are available for purchase. If you’d like to buy one, click on the blue “Buy this Online” bar below for a variety of print and frame options or contact me for digital purchase and licensing options.
Limited Shelf Life
On one of my recent hikes through the autumn woods, I snapped a brightly colored maple leaf that found a resting place on a shelf mushroom.
For those not familiar, shelf mushrooms (or bracket fungi) grow on the side of trees (living and dead). When you find them, they’re usually attached to rough barked trees.
There are dozens of shelf mushroom varieties – different sizes, shapes and colors. They are known by a variety of descriptive names – beefsteak fungus, sulphur shelf, birch bracket, dryad’s saddle, artist’s conk, and turkey tail…and others.
The classification, Polypores, is often used for the type of the hard or leathery fungi (like the one pictured here) that lacks a stem, growing straight out of wood. The polypore’s woody fruiting bodies are called conks.
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All of the photos I post are available for purchase. If you’d like to buy one, click on the blue “Buy this Online” bar below for a variety of print and frame options or contact me for digital purchase and licensing options.
Sitting Pretty
Creation is teaming with unique, delicate beauties for the observant who are persistent to see beyond the obvious.
Within the Puelicher Butterfly Vivarium in the Milwaukee Public Museum there are hundreds of specimens. This one, a Small Postman butterfly, (heliconius melpomene), was among the tiniest. (To view the largest, visit my previous post: Owl Butterfly.)
Postman butterflies are tropical butterflies found in Central and South America. They are most common along sunlit forest edges with flowers.
As sweet as they may appear, they have little to fear from predators. As caterpillars, they feed on passion flower leaves, storing up toxic chemicals they retained throughout their lifespan that makes them foul-tasting to typical predators.
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All of the photos I post are available for purchase. If you’d like to buy one, click on the blue “Buy this Online” bar below for a variety of print and frame options or contact me for digital purchase and licensing options.