Tag Archives: macro photography

Photo of the Week – December 8, 2011

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Tuesday morning was on the chilly side.  When I woke up, it was clear, calm, and minus five degrees Fahrenheit.  In short, a perfect day to head out for some prairie photography!

A frosty seed head of Canada wild rye at a restored prairie on the campus of The Leadership Center - Aurora, Nebraska.

As the sun rose, I was tramping through the snow in a small restored prairie on the east side of Aurora.  I shared the prairie with a small flock of tree sparrows moving around the prairie and feeding on seeds from tall wildflowers and grasses.  There were also a few tracks of mice through the snow, and a great horned owl flushed from the wooded edge of the prairie as I walked in.  Otherwise, it was just me and a lot of frosty prairie plants.

I didn’t set out to photograph any particular thing, but I ended up focusing mainly on frozen flowers.  Below are a few of the images I came home with.  (Click on any photo to see a larger, sharper version of it.)

Entire-leaf rosinweed

New England aster

Tall boneset (Eupatorium altissimum)

Common evening primrose

Annual sunflower (Helianthus annuus)

Canada wild rye

Photo of the Week – December 1, 2011

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The diversity of insect species in prairies – and other ecosystems – is simply mind boggling.  One of my favorite activities with kids is to hand them an insect sweep net and let them find out for themselves just how many different kinds of “bugs” there are in a prairie.  There’s a lot more than just grasshoppers out there…

I also like to quote impressive insect statistics when I give presentations, and one of my favorites comes from a 2000 report by Richard Redak.  Do you know which group of insects has the most species in North America? (The group includes 37% of all insect species on the continent.)  I’ll make it multiple choice, and you can choose from the following:

a) beetles

b) flies

c) wasps/bees/ants

d) butterflies/moths

e) true bugs

Made your guess?  Ok, scroll down to see if you’re right.

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A flower fly (Syrphidae) on yellow/hairy stargrass (Hypoxis hirsuta) along the Platte River in Nebraska.

Surprisingly – to me, anyway – the answer is Flies (the order Diptera).  Would you have guessed that there are more than 36,000 species of flies in North America?  That means that one in three insect species in North America is a fly.  How many species of fly can you name??  Three? (house fly, horse fly, …uh….)  No, butterfly and dragonfly don’t count.

I think it’s fantastic that there are 36,000 variations on those noisy flies that buzz around my head.  Because I’ve been paying attention to pollinators recently, I know that there are many kinds of flies that are valuable pollinators – in fact, flies are second only to bees in terms of effectiveness and importance.  As a photographer, I see a lot of flies hanging around flowers and elsewhere, and I’ve got quite a few fly photos that do look fairly different from each other.  But I still wouldn’t have guessed there were that many kinds.

A robber fly photographed along the Platte River in Nebraska. I love the eyes and claws, especially. ...Just another one of the 36,000 species out there.

Why is it important to have 36,000 kinds of flies?  I’m not sure, but isn’t it great to know they’re out there?  We could discuss the diversity of the ecological roles that flies fill – and they ARE important in many ways – but for me, those things are secondary to the simple fact that they exist.  We live in a great world.

By the way, if you guessed beetles on the quiz above, it’s a great guess – and you’d have been right if the question was about the entire earth.  The tropics have astounding numbers of beetle species, and that pushes them above flies.  But in North America it really is flies.