The Right Lens

 I took my camera on my walk today to try to take pictures of a specific subject, and I needed my zoom lens, so I figured I wouldn't be able to take pictures of bugs, because that's not a great lens for bug photos. Except there are some bugs that are big enough that you don't need a macro lens to photograph them, and you may not be able to get very close to them anyway, so the zoom lens is just find.

I give you... Backyard Bug of the Day:

I don't know what species of dragonfly this is, but it is one that I have only rarely photographed, because this species doesn't let me get as close, ever. Except today. I took this picture on the edge of the small pond...

... which is currently teeming with mosquito larvae. It's basically mosquito soup now. To think, a month ago I was desperately hoping it would rain so the pond would stay full for the ill-fated salamander eggs, and now I wish it would dry up so the mosquito larvae would die. I hope at least that the dragonfly laid eggs in the water–dragonfly larvae eat mosquito larvae. The only problem with that plan being, dragonflies spend a couple of years as larvae, and that would never work in the small pond, because there isn't water there year round. Well, hopefully there is something in there eating them. Not salamander larvae, that's for sure. At the very least, when these emerge as mosquitoes the dragonfly can eat them. And maybe this is the reason that this part of our property is so popular with bats.

The thing I wanted to photograph was the ripples on the big pond. Just because I think it's pretty.

I can't tell if this big pond has mosquito larvae in it, but unfortunately I read that tadpoles rarely eat mosquito larvae, so these wouldn't be much help. They're still cool, though.

I have an app on my phone that identified this as solomon's plume, but listed false solomon's seal as an alternate name. The insect is some kind of longhorn flower beetle.

Backyard Bird of the Day:

Either a downy or hairy woodpecker. I can't tell them apart.

It's funny how in the course of about a week I went from not knowing there are indigo buntings in my yard to knowing where to go to find one:

It had company on its tree, and when the other bird showed up, the bunting stopped singing, and shortly flew away: