I’d like to challenge Dan to identify this fungus (?…maybe it’s not a fungus at all…) that I found protruding from the bark of a tree (I think a maple of some kind).
I don’t know what it is, but it looked cool, and it had a great view of the gorge at Letchworth State Park.
Last weekend, at George Metro Park, I found several small swarms of midges that, in all likelihood, had just emerged from the nearby Cuyahoga river. The swarms were hovering around the park’s boardwalk, so I snapped a few photos of individuals that were resting on the boardwalk posts. They were so small that it was difficult to hold the camera steady, but, from the picture to the left, you can see their thick, feather-like antenna (the effect is not motion blur).
Later, I came across the spider on the right hiding inside a small snow cavern, kind of like a spider igloo. Although it was a relatively warm day (perhaps just above freezing), I thought the pressence of these two animals was interesting.
And here are some images of droplets forming on spider webs the same morning.
McGee Marsh was covered in fog the first time I went. As the morning grew warmer, the moisture in the air began to accumulate on vegetation, among other things, and the droplets made for some cool looking pictures. Here are some photographs I took on the condensation on leaves of various plants.
If it appears as though the posts on this site don’t have a theme, it’s because they don’t. Most posts are basically just a random picture I come across while browsing my collection. This particular photo was taken at the Leicester Falls, which I attribute as the birth place of my interest in photography. Soon after I purchased my first digital camera, an Olympus D-100, I began photographing the Leicester Falls regularly, usually with Mike Valentino. This photo wasn’t taken with my good ol’ D-100, but it was taken with my second digital camera, a Canon PowerShot a530, which is the camera the majority of my pictures were taken with so far.
Collembola are an insect-like arthropod common just about everywhere. In forest leaf litter, many species of collembola graze on fungus as the fungus decomposes leaves and sticks. During the fall, some will come together in mass quantities to breed. I caught one of these breeding events at Kent Bog and snapped this photograph. Horny little buggers.
Many of the Red Maple trees in Kent Bog appear to be under extreme stress (whether it’s due to acidic soil, nutrient limitation or both) and have somewhat of a ‘bonzai’ growth pattern. The leaves tend to be much smaller than one would expect on a Red Maple tree growing in more suitable conditions, say, in a lowland forest setting, rather than a bog. In some cases, the leaves are all less than an inch from the base of the leaf (excluding the petiole) to the tip. Although the scale of this photograph isn’t obvious, the leaf is relatively small. I suppose more importantly, the frost just looks cool. This was taken at the bog during one of our first frosts this past autumn.
On the same rocky outcrop mentioned in the previous post, several small ferns were present, making the rock’s surface appear much more soft.
Under the overhang of a small rocky out crop, the moisture that had been soaked up by moss has frozen, lifting the moss bed and sand particles from the ground.
Given the extra-snowy nature of this Ohio winter, I felt it appropriate for my first post to have some visual representation of the cold. And, of course, what could be better at doing so than a growing ice crystal.