Reader Mariliee Lovit sent a crab spider and some notes:
Female crab spider (Misumena vatia). The spider can change color from white to yellow, and is often seen on goldenrod matching its bright yellow late in summer. Here it is on Rosa nitida. Rather than spin a web, this spider waits in ambush on flowers or other vegetation. It clings to the substrate with its two pairs of small rear legs while waiting with its two powerful pairs of front legs spread wide, ready to pounce.
Here’s a video showing that crab spiders can use both crypsis and contrast with their substrate as a way of getting prey:
And from Idaho, Stephen Barnard sent some photos of his bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus; have you learned the binomial yet?), as well as a picture of his new digiscoping setup, which gives remarkable magnification.
The first shot is my digiscoping setup. You can barely see the eagle nest. (Find the birds.) The next shot is at the greatest digiscope magnification, extracted from a 4K video. The focus gets a little softer as you zoom out, but still not bad.
And. . . chicks are born!!
I got the first clear photo of an eagle chick today. There are at least two.
And another photo that arrived this weekend:
Proud parent. From the eyes, I’m pretty sure this is Lucy and the adult in the previous shot was Desi.
And another lovely picture of parent and chicks:
I watched (on digiscoped video) the adults bringing two fish to the nest within ten minutes. The chicks grow fast and they need a lot of food. Iset up the camera and leave it for hours until the 128GB card fills up with 4K video. 99% of the footage is boring, but there are moments. My 2TB SSD is getting tight!
And two other species:
I’ve been trying to get a sharp BIF (bird-in-flight) of a Killdeer (Charadrius vociferus) for years. Finally. They’re very difficult.
The Swainson’s Hawks (Buteo swainsoni) have recently arrived from Argentina.
Beautiful photos all around. Thanks for sharing them!
Yeah, processing photos! I try to blaze away as much as possible bu then be completely ruthless in Lightroom to delete less-than-keeper shots. Getting better about it …
How on Earth does Stephen find time to get any work done? Or is Deets really well trained?
I need a Deets clone here; there are giant voles in the garden, and tunnels all over.
Great photos, Marilee and Stephen.
Wonderful images. Looking forward to seeing some of the video.
Video is a different kettle of fish than stills. A still can be edited in about a minute and be ready to go. Video requires painstaking effort going through hours of footage, making decision after decision about what to keep and what to discard, and mastering the fiendishly complex Final Cut Pro X editing application. What I have in mind is a chronological record of the nesting season.
“Video requires painstaking effort”
Welcome to the club. I just spent 2 years editing a documentary. Some efficiencies come with practice.
Who is the crab spider’s buddy there among the stamens of the flower?
Yes – a beetle… pointed abdomen suggests female?
I think it’s a tumbling leaf beetle (family Mordellidae), but there’s not much to go for a non-expert like me, any coleopterists out there that can weigh in?
If it is a mordellid, the tapered abdomen is a common feature and not a sexual dimorphism.
I was trying to guess the distance to the eagles from the first photo? Maybe 2 hundred yards, very hard to tell. Great photos.
Nice spider photo. It seems odd to me that many people (including me) are repulsed by spiders, yet avidly consume crabs that look like large spiders.
Indeed! I well remember (dead) smelling yellow jackets as they roasted on top of a wood stove. Smelled just like shrimp cooking!
And, as a former coworker who hated crustaceans: “Water bugs! Ewwww!”
smelling (dead) … not (dead) smelling.
Yikes.
The yellow jackets were dead, lying on top of the wood stove and cooked there.
Now that could put meaning in your life!
Stephen, thank you for the compliment! I was really just taking pictures of the rose, a lovely species that grows in bogs. But the spider turned out to be interesting too. It seemed to be ignoring the other occupant of the rose, probably waiting for a better meal.
I like that the binomial for the killdeer is Charadrius vociferus. If I were every classified, I’d want to have vociferous in the name.
The killdeer also looks worried, like it’s sad to dip its feet in the water in fear that when they disappear beneath the surface, they will be gone for good, leaving it with only stalks to hobble around on. Such is the life of a being without object permanence.
Considering what bald eagles can carry, I hope Stephen’s got that camera chained down.
cr