Macro

Eric looking for living animals underneath substrate. Life is all around us.  The trick is to know where to look for it.  Most animal life, critters as I like to call them, innately make an effort not to be seen.  Besides being vulnerable to predation, they may be subject to desiccation, the vagaries of temperature, or some other factor spelling their potential doom. Time of day and year are both important factors.  Creatures tend to have habits based upon light and temperature.  Dawn and dusk activity, otherwise called crepuscular, is one trend.  Diurnal organisms are ones you will likely see during the day.  Nocturnal habits make associated organisms hard to find both because of lack of light and tendency to be up when we are soundly sleeping. This is where it pays off to hunt in places that the nocturnal and crepuscular critters hide.  One of my favourite hiding places is beneath stuff.  Logs, rocks, boards, paper, plastic, pretty much whatever.  It tends to be dark, moist,

A mason bee on a flower. Maybe this is a bumble bee?  No, because they are quite large, rotund, and have bent antennae.  How about a honey bee?  Also no; they have very yellow abdomens with much less hair.  OK, maybe it is a carpenter bee.  Nope - Carpenter bees are about as large as bumble bees, all black, and have no hair on their abdomen.  And it is not a sweat bee, which is a small, solitary, ground-nesting insect. You may have mason bees living near you.  If there are preexisting holes present and you see a moderately sized bee (may be mistaken for a large fly) flying in and out of it, you probably have mason bees.  Looking further, a mud patch closing the opening secures the deal.  Don't be alarmed though, they are truly beneficial.  One mason bee does the work of 60 regular honeybees.  They are gentle and not likely to sting you.  I have a few darting mere inches away from me while I lounge about on a deck chair in my backyard.  Now, what is really amazing is how cle

Adult katydid What's green, looks like a grasshopper, but isn't a grasshopper?  A katydid!  These insects belong to the same order as grasshoppers, the Orthoptera.  They have similar behaviours and life cycles, and they also eat the same kinds of plants the familiar grasshoppers do.  They are much more similar to grasshoppers than their other cousins, the crickets. It is easy to tell a katydid from a grasshopper; katydids are completely green.  While grasshoppers may have green on them, they frequently are brown and have mottled wings and thorax.  Katydids also have ridiculously long antennae.  A grasshopper's antennae are very short, maybe the length of their head.  A katydid's antennae are two to three times as long as their bodies though.  Katydids are sometimes called long-horned grasshoppers. Katydids can be garden pests, but usually not serious ones.  I found one yesterday morning as I was painting the fence which borders the back of my property.  A juveni