Camera Sunday

I spent some time last Sunday afternoon wandering around the grounds, camera in hand, looking for photo ops. As usual, once I focused on the trees instead of the forest*, a number of interesting details emerged, most of which involved flying creatures of the six-legged variety.

This insect goes by the rather unappealing name of “flesh fly” (genus Sarcophaga), a fly that gets its name from its preference for dining on rotten meat. Our goal is to have dispensed with all rotten meat by each Sunday, so this specimen had to be content with its perch on a Texas Mountain Laurel leaf.

Another flesh fly. I like this photo as much for the matrix of twigs and limbs as for the insect subject.

Our Vitex trees are blooming and attracting a multitude of bees (and hummingbirds). Above is a leafcutter bee getting lost in a mass of blooms.

We don’t see a lot of bumblebees around here, and they seem to be disappearing at an alarming rate, so it was encouraging to see several of them working over the vitex blooms.

Not everything was about airborne invertebrates, though.

This is a bloom on a liriope, more commonly known as monkey grass. They don’t bloom very often, at least in our flowerbeds, probably because they don’t get enough water (but that’s just a guess). So it’s a treat to find them flowering.

And in conclusion, this…because…well, gnarly.

*We don’t actually have a forest, so this is a metaphor…or a simile…or something. It’s definitely not an onomatopoeia.