biscuit

This is a Clymene moth (Haploa clymene), seen on 8/2/2014 in Wentworth NH. I first spotted it high on the bathroom wall (first picture); I tried to move it within reach, and lost it for a while, before finding it again on the wood chips outside the bathroom. It was skittish and flew briskly away; I got a glimpse of striking yellow hindwings, in flight.

Baltimore Snout (Hypena baltimoralis); Wentworth NH, 8/2/2014.

This was photographed in our tent at 10pm, with a cell phone camera.

No moth today. I took the kids to Great Meadows NWR in Concord, so that I could play with my camera. The kids played a game of sticking the tick-trefoil seeds all over me and picking them off again, and seemed to have fun.

The butterfly is an Eastern Tailed-Blue (Cupido comyntas) - both male and female (I think); I've chased and photographed them before, but it was a fun test of the new camera's abilities, and I'm happy with how it came out. I've seen water snakes at Great Meadows before, but this was actually bigger than any I've seen - there was a second one also that I didn't get good photographs of, but was more brightly marked.

Great Meadows NWR, Concord MA, 8/17/2014.

In honor of my new camera, I bring you a poorly executed photo of a Woodlouse Hunter (Dysdera crocata) - Medford MA, 8/16/2014. George and I went to Brooks Estate, and were turning over logs in the stump dump, and came upon this large and active spider.

I was out primarily to get some practice with the new camera; since getting home, I have figured out how to lock the autofocus to the central focus point, but I hadn't gotten that working when we found the spider, and I found myself chasing it around the bowl-shaped hollow with the camera persistently focussing on closer points off-center. I am finding that the auto-exposure presets are much better than what I was using before - there's less need to manually adjust, and also that the macro lens is wholly satisfactory in terms of being able to deliver magnification and narrow focal plane.