Profusion

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Wild Wildlife: Small Worlds

[a goldfinch preening]

Even when walking through the zoo I’ve been trying to pay more attention to the unofficial flora and fauna around me, from the starlings trilling in the trees to the flowers and plants beaded with water glittering in the light.


When some good friends I haven’t seen in years came to visit, I had more opportunities to observe and enjoy non-zoo wildlife, since we visited several little gardens around the National Mall. We admired the odd flowers in the Ripley Garden, like a waterfall of petals that sprouted into little yellow firework flowers:


I noticed the decaying leaves covered in droplets of water, beautiful in their death:

And we goggled at a plant whose leaves were covered with sharp, stiff thorns:


Looking more closely at one of these leaves, I noticed a strange and interesting arthropod traversing its surface. It wasn’t an insect: we counted eight legs. And yet a couple of these “legs” looked a lot more like claws—as if this insect were some kind of pseudo-scorpion.


I took a couple of close-up shots, and I would have taken more, but the potential scorpion approached the camera and raised its claws very aggressively, so I backed away and went back to admiring the flowers.

{A note: I do write all text and take all pictures. Please do not reproduce either without my permission.}

Wild Wildlife Returns!

Actually, it’s always there; it’s just that I only rarely get good pictures of these other animals and/or write entries about them. But lately I’ve been seeing a lot of birds and insects around the zoo, and luckily for me, at least some of them behaved photogenic-ly.

The monarch above was hanging around the milkweed behind the invertebrate house, just on the outside of their butterfly house. A few people leaving the exhibit were worried that the monarch had escaped from inside. (To my mind, they should be more worried about the children and adults in the butterfly house who try to catch the butterflies.)

And this mysterious bug (well, mysterious only because I don’t know what it is) appeared to be watching the elephants:


And these ladybugs were trying to have an intimate moment when I voyeuristically interrupted them:


This catbird had a very involved preening session near the otter enclosure:



And this goldfinch was very intent on getting every last seed out of these coneflowers:




And this bee, while she moved too fast to be really obliging, did pose herself alongside a beautiful waterlily: