ANOTHER EVENING - ANOTHER SET OF INVERTEBRATES AND PLANTS

8 days ago

I did it again. The place was the same, and so was the time. I drove about five or six kilometers to Palera to spend an hour or so in the field covered with tall grass and other herbaceous vegetation, busy searching for amazing small details to serve you on a digital plate in today's post. Hope you'll enjoy it.

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The sun was very near the horizon when I arrived...

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... and the scenery looked great in that warm evening light. I was thinking about getting a wide shot that includes most of the things around me when I noticed an insect resting on a leaf, beautifully illuminated by the sun that was almost ready to set. I mean, I didn't really see the insect, only the dark silhouette of its shadow. The backlight made the long, narrow leaf of the Rumex crispus plant translucent enough to reveal the bushcricket on the other side.

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Here you can see the Rumex crispus leaves protruding like spears from the sea of surrounding vegetation.

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Soon, the insect changed its pose, it was standing upside down now, so I took another shot through the leaf.

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Rumex crispus is commonly known as the curly dock. For this photograph, I got closer to the ground, and I also spaced out a bit of the dense surrounding vegetation to show you the entire plant.

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Here you can see the same insect in both poses, at the same time. I also came a bit closer to the subject in these two shots.

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This photograph was taken through the macro lens. I managed to get very close after a bit of well-rehearsed sneaking. I don't wanna brag about my sneaking capabilities, but sometimes I just can't resist the urge to do it. Years of fixation with macro photography made a very stealthy dude out of me, and I wanna all world to know it. 😁
After all these portraits of a shadow, I wanted to get a picture of the real insect on the other side. In the following shot ...

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... you can finally see the bushcricket that provided the shadow. It's a Tettigonia viridissima. A small, young, wingless nymph of that species.

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Here you can see the Sonchus oleraceus flower buds photographed with flash and in natural light.

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This photograph shows a bit more of that juicy herbaceous plant commonly known as the common milk thistle.

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This tiny flower belongs to Geranium dissectum, commonly known as the cut-leaved crane's bill. The following photograph ...

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... shows the entire plant. From a distance, the flowers look like vivid little dots scattered across the greenery.

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This Monacha cartusiana snail was resting, sealed in its shell, on the upper part of the plant shown in the previous photograph.

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Anthemis arvensis, commonly known as the mayweed or scentless chamomile, is the plant that covers most of the field I'm lately spending my evenings on.
Its growth is so dense that photographing a single plant looks like an almost impossible task.
To get the portrait shown in the above picture, I had to remove a bit of the surrounding vegetation. In the following photograph ...

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... you can see a fly posing on the top of another Anthemis arvensis plant, about ten meters further.

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The name of the species is Suillia gigantea. It belongs to the Heleomyzidae family. A bit later, not far from there ...

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... a moth from the Plutellidae family landed on a plant of the same kind.

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The name of the species is Plutella xylostella.

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The scarlet pimpernel (Lysimachia arvensis) is a small, gracile plant that grows in the shade under the much taller, robust ones presented earlier in the post.
Its flowers are open only during the daytime.

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Open or closed, these tiny red flowers are always very elegant.

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Here you can see an even smaller spiderling feeding on its minuscule prey. This is a very young Neoscona adianta spider. The species belongs to the Araneidae family. The spiderling has built a web among the upper leaves of the Anthemis arvensis plant.

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These tiny things that resemble flowers are the fruits of another small plant, visible only when you space out a bit the dense community of the taller ones.

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I used the macro lens to make them look very big in these two shots.

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The plant in question is Cerastium glomeratum, commonly known as the Mouse-ear chickweed.

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It took me a bit of patience and quite a few failed attempts to get this relatively sharp shot in very low ambient light.

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The night was almost there when I started photographing the Mouse-ear chickweed.

Here you can see another Neoscona adianta spiderling approaching the prey caught in the web.

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I took these two photographs an hour earlier, when the sun was still visible low in the sky. They both show a portrait of the Capsella bursa-pastoris plant. The one on the left was taken in ambient light. For the one on the right, I used the small, built-in flash of my camera.

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