roadkill

How to start losing your phone. 

Everyone knows its true that we should use our phones less. But we need them for safety, to contact people, for directions to not get lost and for pictures. But somehow, we get stuck inside our air conditioned houses, staring at pictures of cute kittens without even getting out of bed. So, how are we using them wrong? I was thinking of this while I was leaning out over the ditch trying to get another "perfect" picture of a butterfly while my dog was patiently waiting for his walk and the horse flies were buzzing all around us looking for exposed flesh to attack. What I came up with was I really needed to learn this fancy gadget that my smartphone has morphed into. 

Of course, this blurred picture of a towhee can be cleaned up "in studio" which is something I am working on learning too. I mean, I know all the ins and outs of facebook and google, but have barely the first idea how my camera settings work. And that is all on me, that is what I can own, and do something about.

I have four cameras and I can't even use half of them normally, let alone understand their full potentials. I was thinking also about this while I was trying to get my camera to turn off the flash to get a distance picture of my first raccoon. 

Can you see the flash reflected in his eyes?

Eventually the animal got tired of posing and wandered off.  Next time, I'll just put my finger over the flash. I have noticed that taking pictures is great, but they gradually lose context of what a person is trying to do. Which is better? 3,000 pictures I will never see again, or one hand drawn picture in a margin of a book? My amateurish illustrations from a trip to Australia still instantly transport me back there.

I have started carrying a specimen container and a kid's bug catcher around to make it easier to capture and take pictures of small critters. While marveling at all the wasps and pollinators around right now, I noticed the horseflies are the ones actually biting a lot these days. Makes you wonder why people are so against wasps. See yesterday's blog for better background. 

There's a wide variety of butterflies out right now, probably due to all the pollinating plants about. They seem to especially like this one:

 As the ditch water level was low again, there were the usual abundance on baby crawfish marching determinedly up the ditch. I realized they were easily visible against the concrete lined ditch, but also because they were not in burrows along the clay lined sections; they were visible due to different behaviors.

 New Mexico does not have a termite problem, mostly because its so dry.

The termites we do have in New Mexico are not the "type" that eat people's houses, like in the cartoons. This picture is of a family is called Archotermopsidae and they look just like big red ants with wings. They were out in the UV light traps I put outside my house.

Roadkill

There is a big gross toad splattered in the middle of the road, like I wrote just yesterday, the animals usually active in the evening are not moving around at night, and are getting squished. Cars kill tons of animals from mammals to insects, and especially migrating amphibians.

Please drive slow and try to look out for toads in the road!