Upon Closer Inspection

This weekend, our family visited my in-laws in Sarpy County (south of Omaha).  While we were there, I grabbed a couple hours of photography time during an evening and morning when the wind was nearly calm.  In the evening, I poked around a little prairie planting in the yard.  The next morning I walked a grassy cropfield edge. 

From a distance, neither area looked like it had much going on. Very few flowers were in bloom, and there wasn’t much obvious insect activity.  As always happens with prairies, though, there’s always much more than meets the eye – sometimes you just have to get down on your knees and look for it.  I took some of my favorite photos from those couple hours and made them into a brief slideshow.

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Photo of the Week – May 17, 2012

It’s amazing what you can find when you’re crawling around on the ground…

A wolf spider stares at me as I take its (her?) photo. The Nature Conservancy’s Platte River Prairies, Nebraska.  The leg span of this spider was only about 1.5 inches.  Certainly not the biggest I’ve seen, but plenty big to intimidate people who are already squeamish about arachnids!

As I was on my knees counting plants inside a square meter plot frame last week, this little (big?) wolf spider came crawling out of the litter.  I managed to corral it into the handy little ziplock bag I carry for just such emergencies, and a half hour later when I returned to my truck, I let it back out to see if it would pose for photos.  Not having my wheelbarrow photo studio handy, I had to make do with just blocking its repeated escape attempts with my hand until it got fed up and decided to sit still and consider its next move.  It gave me about 30 seconds to squeeze off a few shots. 

Then it dashed off again, and I let it go.  I had plants to count, and the spider had a meal to find.