Farewell to September

It seems an age since I was in New Plymouth but then realised that I was there for 1 September - maybe my brain put the clocks forward a month instead of just an hour for daylight saving time! It's a tad hard getting up in the dark again but compensated by having time in the evening to work outside. Today has been a scorcher with my thermometer registering a low of 6°C and a high of 31°C. No wonder the plants get confused with a frost one day and midsummer temperatures the next!

Yesterday I filled up the ice-cream cabinet with soil, burying the dead possum in the process, and planted a new rhubarb plant on top. Today was the potatoes' turn and I now have 6 bags of sprouting spuds in the shade house. I'll take some photos when they poke some shoots through the soil.

Clearing out the shade house - I pulled out all the plastic
flooring and hosed it down. Old carpet would be better!

Underneath the plastic were 'knots' of long skinny worms - some over
30cm long - I thought they were threads to begin with

The fine weather is a good excuse to walk slowly round my traps each day to look for Darwin's barberry plants. It's easy to spot the adult plants as they are smothered in yellow/orange flowers but the seedlings are expert at hiding.

You're looking for a leaf like this...

...with yellow roots and stems if you cut through the brown outer layer...

...and this type of growth

It's great that I haven't found any flowering barberry on my section this year - when I first arrived there were plants all over the place.

Flowering Darwin's barberry - September 2011

When you're walking slowly then you see all sorts of things - how about this scurrying (and out-of-focus) barberry-flower lookalike...

 

Or this fly that let me get a photo before buzzing off...

 

It wasn't until I downloaded the photos to my computer this evening that I saw all the small white critters on the underside - can you spot any?

 

 

This beautiful orb spider is two steps away from the ranchslider so easy to keep an eye on it; the first photo shows the intricate detail on its abdomen and the second, taken after the sun went down, shows it keeping tabs on its web by resting one leg on a strand.

A magnified world

One task I had when I was in New Plymouth was to find a good magnifying glass, or loupe, so I could see more detail of the intriguing litter critters. I wanted a decent quality lens, preferably with a light, but wasn't sure where to look. I asked at SpecSavers when I had my eye test, and also looked at craft shops and The Warehouse - nothing doing there except plastic ones with no light. There are plenty on TradeMe but they are hard to assess from a picture. A friend suggested Philatelic Distributors and I struck gold with a 20x pull out magnifier with an LED light.

I love getting close-ups of wee critters - it's opened a new world to me and given me an appreciation of Mother Nature's efficient recycling system; if only humans were as good! My camera is great; using macro mode and then zooming up on screen I get to see details that aren't apparent with my sight - it got me wondering if I could get even closer using both the camera and the loupe.

Here are some macro photos that I've taken recently...

This beetle was on the same tree with all the holes drilled in it - I wonder
if this is the adult?

A willing fly on a rhubarb leaf - it didn't budge an inch whilst I
manoeuvred to get as close as possible. It looks like a wee tick at the base
of its wing 

Native snails are hard to get in focus in close-ups because of their depth

A small huhu grub - its mouthparts are amazing

 

Yesterday I experimented taking a photo by holding the loupe up to the viewfinder of the camera. I found a willing spider and tried different methods - most of which needed four hands. The LED light on the loupe was a bit fierce at times and the photos aren't sharp enough to keep but thought I'd pop them up on the blog so I can see what progress I make over the next few months.

Spider - using just the macro function on the camera

Macro on camera plus light

Macro on camera plus light plus holding viewfinder up to loupe to magnify
the image. Note the blue colour aberration caused by the loupe.

Another spider that offered to pose - isn't he a cutie

YouTube has lots of videos with helpful hints on macro photography, including this one that shows you how to make your own LED ring light; this would give a more even light across the subject.

I have more photos for the next blog - I hope I'm not boring you :)

 

More pics

Here's more discoveries from the archives...

Fingers of ?algae growing up over a tree stump

Two jelly-like growths on rotten wood - a millipede is feeding on the left

These two mites were on the top surface

Not easy capturing these moving critters

A red mite - apparently these 'ram' Collembola and pierce their skin

Still trying to get that sharp shot!

Another kind of mite

Unknown critters

A 'family' of Collembola

 

Upside-down Collembola

 

An upside down spider with legs slowly unfurling

Horizontal cobweb - a great feat of engineering

 

What on earth...??

I'm accumulating lots of photos of weird and wonderful things but, despite poring over books and websites, I'm no nearer identifying them - so I'll throw them open to you in the hope that we can learn together.

This caught my eye - it was on some rotting wood and I thought that
it was eggs of some kind 

Zooming up made them less egg-like but definite structures of some kind

This long skinny thing didn't move so I'm leaning toward it being a seedhead

Unusual fungi growing on the side of a rimu log

A white grub feeding on very soggy rotten wood

A sprouted seed perhaps?

A see-through grub of some kind

Another grub with red innards

Close-up of above

A native slug?

A wormy-looking 'thing'

The 'worm' when it unravelled

Some brown fungi - but what's that on the right? See bigger pic below



It moved so I guess it's a mite of some kind