Today's photos:
The Fox Park Trailhead of the Leon Creek Greenway is on Hausman Rd between Babcock Rd and IH-10. I walked south toward Bamberger Park this morning to the northern most point I had walked the Greenway on Monday.
On Wednesday, it seemed like every creature and its cousin was trying to get in front of the camera to have its picture taken. Today was more subdued, but definitely not lacking in photographic opportunities. Beyond that, I will let the photos speak for themselves in this post.
The Nogales Trail in the Medina River Natural Area follows an electric utility easement most of the distance from the Rio Medina to the El Chaparral Trail. All of the trees have been cleared from the easement, but Turk's cap and Texas bindweed grow in abundance attracting numerous butterflies. Here are a few photos:
I have found photographing butterflies to be a real challenge. Like the bees and other insects, they usually don't spend much time in one place even when feeding. They are constantly flitting from one flower to another, or flying around in what appears to be a very haphazard pattern.
I have had more success photographing them in cooler weather when they don't move quite so fast and occasionally land to soak in the warmth of the sun. In this case, the abundance of both flowers and butterflies made getting their photo a little more manageable.
When I was walking the Medina River Greenway trail this past Friday, August 19, Snow-on-the-Mountain were in full bloom along several sections of the trail. I happened to notice a very small orange object moving on top of one of the flowers. On closer inspection, I realized it was a butterfly with wings no longer than a half inch:
I'm not using a traditional macro-photography system to photograph this type of close-up. I am actually using a regular telephoto zoom lens set at 300 mm combined with a very high resolution image processing system. So, when I'm taking the photos, I am standing five to six feet from whatever it is I'm photographing. This makes the process somewhat less invasive and a little safer when photographing creatures like bees and wasps.
Even through the camera's viewfinder, I usually can't see much of the fine detail. For example, when I was actually looking at this last butterfly, I had no idea the outer margins of its wings are very fine hair-like filaments. It wasn't until I saw the photos on the computer monitor that I fully realized its subtly awesome beauty.
For an excellent illustrated list of butterflies of Bexar County on the sanaturalareas.org website, click here.
Today's photos:
This morning I walked the Leon Creek Greenway from the Bamberger Nature Park trailhead south to just past the Buddy Calk trailhead where there is a naturally embayed pond. On my return walk to the parking lot, I left the main greenway trail and walked one of the natural surface (dirt) trails through Bamberger Nature Park.
I'm still trying to process this morning's walk - in every sense of the term. I'm not sure if, with three months experience, I'm really getting better at observation, or if mother nature has just become unusually cooperative lately. Whatever it is, if I continue getting exceptional sets of photos at the rate I have been on recent walks, I may add Saturday and / or Sunday posts just to keep up with getting the photos published in a timely manner.
This morning was by far the most intense experience I have had since beginning this blog just over three months ago. Almost every time I looked in a new direction, I had a new encounter. The biodiversity was literally unexpected and overwhelming. Rather than publish an overwhelming set of photos in this post, consider the above series, while powerful in its own right, as an introduction to four Tuesday and Thursday posts that will be published in the coming weeks.
As a bit of foreshadowing of posts to come, in the real world, roadrunners don't go "beep-beep."
It is easy to loose sight of the smaller things in life. When walking, the larger things: the sky, the larger plants and animals, the ground in general, are perfectly obvious. Bright colored flowers stand out from the background. The smaller things tend to vanish into unawareness.
On my walk at Crescent Bend Nature Park on Friday, August 5, the bright pink flowers stood out from the surrounding ground cover both because of their brilliant color and because they were the only large cluster of flowers in the immediate area. The bees taking advantage of the clustered food source were much less obvious, but it didn't take long to realize the honey bees were hard at work gathering nectar as they also spread the flowers' pollen.
When bees are at work, they don't spend much time on any one flower. They flit about very quickly. This presents a photographic challenge in focusing when working in the macro-range with a telephoto lens. In this case, there were so many bees, the problem was solved by focusing on a single cluster of flowers then waiting for a bee to appear:
