Scottish Fungus

Happened upon while wandering at Ardtornish on the west coast of Scotland – autumn 2016
- Aperture: ƒ/4
- Camera: DSC-RX10M3
- Focal length: 135.88999938684mm
- ISO: 640
- Shutter speed: 1/250s
Happened upon while wandering at Ardtornish on the west coast of Scotland – autumn 2016
Facing off on the flowers of a wild carrot plant with an ant. Who will back down first?
I had some difficulty identifying this fellow but with a little external assistance pinned it down as a ‘Weevil Wasp’ … a future contributor to the 1000 Species Project when I have done some more reading up on them.
Photographers often sing the praises of “the golden hour” at sunset or “the blue hour” just after and they are worth making use of. However, I often find that to my eye, maybe not yours, the really interesting light is in the middle of a heavy shower of rain when there are no shadows, the light is diffused and the colours of flowers positively glow.
This Monarch butterfly prospected the garden in the early morning before settling for a while on this, yet to flower, golden rod stem. There are plenty of milkweed plants nearby so hopefully eggs, caterpillars and then more butterflies.
Homing in on a rose …
This week the moss on the waterfall has pushed up a forest of sporangia
Blue Jays are far from being the rarest birds around but they always stand out from the crowd.
I was particularly pleased with the feather detail and the glint in the bird’s eye in this photograph which was taken from the opposite side of the garden, so some considerable distance.
One from the archives … a beautiful day’s walking on the Dorset cliffs back in 2012 with my sister. Clearly it gets breezy up there.
Once known as Rosa rubrifolia … the flowers only appear for about a week but the hips at the end of the year are enormous.
R. glauca is a species rose, which is to say that the variety is unchanged from its original form in the wild. It is native to Europe and thrives in mountainous regions and in climates as frigid as Zone 2