As the year winds down, I’ve been looking back at some of my favorite photos from 2023. I’ve had a bunch of fantastic opportunities to travel around the central U.S. this year – sometimes for work and sometimes for fun. It’s also been a great year for photography close to home.

In today’s post, I’m sharing some of my favorite photos that came from right here in Aurora, Nebraska during the last year. Some are from my yard and others are from Lincoln Creek Prairie, which is about a mile across town from my home (and the site for my 2018 square meter photography project).

Red milkweed beetles are hard for me to pass up. For one thing, they often sit nicely for photos, which is handy. More importantly, they’re just interesting-looking creatures, with their long antennae and bright red bodies. It looks like they have four big eyes on their face, but that’s actually because their two primary eyes are bisected by the bases of their antennae! The three milkweed beetles shown here were all photographed on the same day.

Back in July, I wrote a half-serious post about the unfairness of naming plants and animals “false” something-or-other just because they happened to look kind of like another species. I used the false milkweed bug and its favorite food source, false sunflower, as examples. At the end of the post, I suggested better names for the two species: spark bug and fab-u-lous ox-eye. The photo below features both species.

Waking up in the morning to photograph bees on their overnight roosts, often covered in dew, is one of my favorite activities. I had a lot of those photo opportunities this year, but here are three I really liked from Lincoln Creek Prairie.

There you go. I’m lucky to have quick access to small restored prairie close to home, as well as lots of prairie plants in my yard, but most of you who are reading this probably have areas of native plantings within a few miles of your home. If so, take the opportunity to find and enjoy the natural beauty and diversity living right around you! Maybe you can compete with this trio in Australia and the amazing project they undertook in their backyard.

Stay tuned for more ‘best of 2023’ photo series soon!