you can always count on five minutes of nature to fix you up

My brain just turned to mush today. I was deciphering some spreadsheets for work – nasty, complicated things with eighteen million little internal references, none of the calculations complicated in themselves, but a spaghetti soup of one cell referring to another to another to another to another – and since I didn’t build them, I’m not familiar with them, and I needed to potentially debug a glitch. At some point, I realized my brain was just simply … not operational.

“Go Outside,” said Inner WiseWoman.

“Five more minutes" I grumbled back.

“GO OUTSIDE.”

“There is nothing to see,” I groused. “Fall is here. Everything’s turning brown. Mmnneeehhh.”[that’s how I spell whining.]

“You just sit down on the ground, little lady,” my I.W.W. scolded.

“Fine. Harrumph”. I sat down at the edge of the woods.

And then this happened.

Hello! I believe this is a katydid. It sat there vibrating slightly, something on its back pulsing in and out of light, as though it were mirror-signaling the mothership. Look at its…shoulder blades, for lack of a better term.

See it’s sort of dark and compressed? We’ll call this “Off”.

 

Now that same spot is raised and reflecting the sun. We’ll call this “On”.

Off – on – off – on. I took pictures like mad, until my camera suddenly stopped. Crap. I yelled at it. Had I melted it with the power of my fried brain? Because I can do that to my tools – nothing is safe from my brainwaves.

Nope, it turned out my SD card was full. Not unlike my head. Just as I had had to make myself go outside to recharge, I now needed to go back in to download these pictures so that I could wipe the card. But I felt at least partly restored, so I went back inside. Within a few minutes – with the assistance of the Extend-o-Brain known as Kevin – the spreadsheets were beaten into submission. 

I downloaded the pictures.

CHECK OUT THOSE EYEBALLS.

And now – when I typically share a video on YouTube, it’s my own crappy little video of a tadpole, or utter blackness filled with the calls of barred owls. (It will be a while before I win an Oscar for nature documentary.)  The video I’m about to share with you is NOT mine; I found it when researching this post. It is fabulous. Well, if your definition of fabulous includes watching a katydid in super close-up grooming its foot, and then seemingly examining the lens of the camera that’s filming it, actually kind of bobbing up and down and side to side as though to get a good look, and then turning its butt to the viewer, then you’re in for a treat. The rest of you probably haven’t even gotten this far in this post. so psssshhhhhh, who needs you.

Enjoy!

here, have a rainbow

day lily


honeysuckle

orange hawkweed


calendula


black-eyed susan


katydid nymph

sensitive fern, fertile front thereof


possibly blue-eyed grass. never was quite sure about this one.


morning glory


thistle


siberian iris

a grass, a sedge, and scary monster aliens (as usual)

Remember my project to learn grasses? <chuckle> Yeah, good luck with that. I have tentatively identified one of them, though. The one I called “green chevron”. It seems to be quack grass – Agropyron repens. This beauty has started flowering.

My guidebook says that the inflorescence (all-the-flowers-collectively) are flat (true), and that the flowers have their backs toward the stem (also true).

Yep!

This one seems to provide the framework for a spider web…and lo and behold, the spider’s quite visible, at the top of the picture. Naturally, I didn’t notice it while photographing it.

And here is some sort of little fly…

So pretty. Let’s move on and give other species a shot, shall we?

Queen Anne’s lace – there’s that little purple flower at the center again.
And now for the False Solomon’s Seal. I just wanted to see how big the berries were getting.

The plump ones are maybe 3/16”. I didn’t see any more sawfly larvae eating them, but I did see this little inchworm…

…working its way around from berry to berry. I made a 30 second film of him, for which he stood on his back end, erect, not moving. It didn’t make for an exciting oeuvre, but the mosquitos sure loved that I kept still for so long.
Right next to this was one of the leaves of the plant. I noticed idly that they’re already turning a little brown around the edges, but then I looked more closely.

Gaagghhhh!  A scary spider. Shudder. I know, Little Miss Amateur Naturalist – but this one just looks like some kind of alien in rest mode, prior to attacking the ship.

So why don’t I mind the 1/8” baby grasshopper katydid nymph [thanks, BugGuide!] sitting on some flowering Timothy grass?
Here’s another one I think I identified – barberpole sedge (Scirpus rubrotinctus).

I ran into Best Beloved in the driveway – he has been feeling a little under the weather lately, perhaps because he is allergic to All Grasses, Trees, Flowers, and Pollinating Things, and hey, not a day goes by without some more pollen being released. (In fact, I actually saw pollen floating off some quack grass when I felt the stem to verify it was round.) He looked at this particular photo, and wondered, is that a spiderweb? a fungus? (It’s a little hard to see on the camera’s display.) I’m thinking, yeah, it’s a spiderweb... 
…because check out the upper left corner of the picture.

…more scary alien legs.