SUMMER ADVENTURES - episode 8 - MOMENTS BEFORE THE RAIN
There is a strange calm ...
... on the otherwise frenetic summer meadows ...
... teeming with life ...
... when the dark clouds are approaching at a slow but steady pace, obscuring on their way the usual strong midday sun ...
... when you can hear the echoes of the distant thunders... while observing the small things hidden in the tall grass ...
... like this strange grasshopper ...
... with extremely long legs and antennae, well adapted for this world made of straws and long narrow leaves ... but there is one place, one community, here on the meadow, where these moments are lived and experienced at a completely different speed ...
... the ants are frenetically collecting, sorting, and transporting the seeds of grass ...
... meanwhile ...
... well camouflaged on the green of the blackberry shrubs bordering with the earthy colors of the meadow ...
... this beautiful, and pretty rare ( at least here where I live) grasshoppers are mating ...
... and so are these minuscule beetles ...
... shinning in the lovely shades of copper ...
... this colorful fly covered with nice fur ...
... is moving slowly through the foliage ... and this beetle is standing still ...
... buried in the blackberry flower ... in clear contrast with the ants ...
... that are relentlessly continuing their work ... while high above them ...
... up on the stem of grass ... the butterflies ...
... small moths ... like this, very mimetic one ...
... and various bugs ... are resting in the grass ...
... this species looks pretty different, depending on the angle from which you look at it...
... back in the green of the blackberry plants ...
... we see an elegant green cricket ...
... and a tiny young grasshopper, appropriately green ... and then ... we can suddenly switch to the meadow ...
... to see a similarly sized and shaped brown one ...
... and encounter another mimetic moth, this one down at the ground level of a meadow ...
... near to the ant colony ...
... where if you look from above ... like in some drone picture ...
... you can see an interesting topography, almost like an image of the human village on google maps ... the ants are amazing, very often the sings of their activities look like the signs of some ancient civilization ...
... they took the grains and piled them ...
... and this little stash of grain ...
... looks spectacular to me ...
... meanwhile ...
... many other insects on the meadow...
... like this usually fearful grasshopper ...
... always ready for a sudden jump ...
... or this fast little fly ...
... are unusually still and easy to photograph ...
... while the gray clouds are rolling in the sky ... and the day is getting darker ...
... but this post is not over yet :) there are a few more things to see ...
... like this lovely little jumping spider ...
... or a colorful Argiope spider ...
... it has recently overgrown his skin, and now the old layer of the exoskeleton is floating above him like a ghost spider ...
... there is shiny, metallic green, little fly to see ...
... and this little bee ...
... lethargic in the center of the dandelion flower ...
... and now ... with this butterfly ...
... and a few bugs & beetles shots ...
... it's time to bring this cloudy post to an end ...
... that's it for today ... have a good day ... or night ... wherever on the planet you are ...
( As always in these posts on Steemit, all the photographs ... and the GIFs made of some of those photographs ... are my work )
My special gratitude goes to the community of local ants who have allowed me to photograph up close their serious and vital work and has retained the biting at a necessary minimum, and I haven't injured a single ant that has bitten me - I swear. I like the ants so much, I'm so fascinated with them that I could never purposely hurt them. I have kitchen ants at home and I let them be ... but sometimes incidents happen ... like when I eat a lot of them in the honey, they were drowned in a glass of honey ... and it was dark ... but this is another story ... didn't taste bad, though ...
How much can you love a post? That's how much I love this. Your sympathy for all living things comes through. Your vivid experience of life, in its varied and sometimes puzzling forms--thanks for allowing us to share that. The spider eats the fly, the ant eats the spider, Borjan eats the ant (accidentally).
I look forward to the next post.
:D Thank you ... makes me very happy when someone can experience and be interested in these little things through these posts, Is very rewarding for me ... thanks
I tried to find a picture of our local opossum...I'm sure I have one somewhere. I love your art so much. Delightful. If I find that picture, I will share it. Every now and then, the opossum makes an appearance :) (or maybe there's more than one...they all look alike to me--except the babies)
Hope you'll find the opossum picture :)
As usual nice pictures buddy. The gif's looks really good. Overall still you have the greenish effect on most of the pictures it seems.
Anyhow the patience and determination to catch these lovely moments are appreciable.
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This post looks like it is from a nature documentary :O
:D I saw tons of those documentaries, so that ''documentary way of talking '' about nature, got under my skin.
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