Super Vision

A question I get asked a lot when people look at my pictures of really tiny things is, "How do you find these?!" I assure you, I do not have visual superpowers. I find them because I am looking for them. A lot of it is serendipitous (that's my favorite word, by the way). And sometimes I find something really, really tiny, something I would never see with my eyes alone, just because I am looking at something else through my macro lens and it allows me to see what I could not before. That is the case with today's Backyard Bug of the Day. I saw a smallish bug on a tree from a few feet away. I got closer to take a picture of it, and saw an even smaller spider. I focused on that and an even smaller bug wandered into view. Even looking closely, if I looked at the trunk of the tree with just my eyes, if that bug was not moving I would not have known it was a bug. It was too tiny to see that that is what it was.
So, here it is, Backyard Bug of the Day, tiny bug on a tree:

There were a lot of them, as I eventually noticed:

And just to prove I do not have super-human powers of observation, I did not see the other bug in this picture until I was looking at pictures to choose which ones to post:

Backyard Buds are a lot easier to find. I could not decide which to choose today, so we'll have two Backyard Buds of the Day. Well, two plants, two pictures of each, because I had difficulties making decisions.

Backyard Co-Bud of the Day #1:

These might be sassafras. I think it's cool that the bigger bud opened, and inside are baby leaves AND flower buds. Buds withing a bud.


Backyard Co-Bud of the Day #2:

Grapevine leaves. A most amazing pink!

I don't give the long view of things very much, so here's the.... flowers? of a black birch:

I found an ant climbing on a tree, carrying what I thought was a bit of green leaf. When I looked through the lens, though, it looked more like a green larva of some kind...

It's a bug eat bug world.

Last week I featured a tiny bug that I didn't get a really good shot of. I got a better shot today, and zoom/cropped it, so the details of it are easier to see. For one thing, I can tell now that it is an insect, not an arachnid...

The thing with bugs this tiny is the macro lens only magnifies so much. Something this small, to really get a good look, I then have to zoom in on the picture.

Bugs weren't the only things I saw today. Actually, I heard this critter before I saw him:

Of course, the macro lens is not ideal for taking pictures from 15 feet away, so I had to zoom this one, too...

Okay, now it's time for some arachnid appreciation, but without spiders...

First, just a web:

Though it remained horribly gloomy all day, it only rained in the morning. This web held onto the water droplets for the afternoon.

Now for an actual arachnid, but not a spider. It's a harvestman, often called a Daddy Longlegs, but apparently there are three things called Daddy Longlegs - there's some kind of fly, and there is a spider, but the harvestman is the spidery kind of thing that crawls across your face when you are trying to sleep in a tent but you can't because of course there's a rock right under your sleeping bag. There's an urban (or maybe it should be called something else, since these are not so urban) legend that these are the most venomous of all spiders, but you don't have to worry about it because their fangs can't penetrate your skin, or some such nonsense. Well, it's not a spider, it doesn't have fangs, and it doesn't have venom. It does, however, have a kind of bizarre defense mechanism. It can jettison a leg when there is a predator trying to grab it, and the nerves in the leg make it continue to twitch like it's alive, distracting the predator and allowing the harvestman to get away.

Or so I have read. I have never seen this happen. But here it is:

And on that note... I hope you are not sleeping in a tent tonight.