June Ends

Spring Green Preserve

We've reached the end of a rather hot and rainy June. Days off work with good weather have been a little hard to come by, so my nature outings were fewer this month. Spring Green Preserve has an incredible diversity and richness of subjects to offer the naturalist and nature photographer, making it an easy destination choice on a day off with gorgeous weather. I rave about Spring Green frequently and my blog readers know it's of my favorite natural areas in Wisconsin; I'm very thankful it's close to Madison.


Puccon

Throughout spring, summer, and fall, the prairie transfers from one accent to another. Sometimes yellow prevails against the green, other times it's blue or purple. St. John's Wort is wrapping up, so too has Goats Rue, and the Prickly Pear Cactus bloom is nearly over. Still, some early June wildflowers linger. Now flowering Lead Plant has the stage. Though it seems rather diminutive at a quick glance, it's a pretty astonishing flower when viewed up close.


Lead Plant


Lark Sparrow

The most obvious birds of the prairie are sparrows: Field, Grasshopper, Vesper, and Lark Sparrows. It's nice that there seems to be a bumper crop of Grasshopper Sparrows this year. The males are still busy defending territories with song, which gave me plenty of opportunities to capture nice portraits of them.


Grasshopper Sparrow


Grasshopper Sparrow


Vesper Sparrow

When walking the sandy trails at Spring Green Preserve, don't forget to look down. There are lots of interesting insects like Tiger Beetles, Velvet Ants, Dung Beetles, and Robber Flies just in front of your feet as you walk.


Beautiful Tiger Beetle


Robber Fly

I think Robber Flies are frighteningly cool insects that resemble something out of sci-fi horror flick with nasty behavior to boot. They have a spike-shaped proboscis that they jab into their prey and use it to inject saliva containing a mix of neurotoxins and enzymes that paralyze and digest the insides. Nice, huh? The devilish fly then sucks out the liquefied meal through its proboscis.


Robber Fly with prey

© 2010 Mike McDowell

At-At Day Afternoon

There is nothing I could really say besides, ‘Star Wars fans must watch this video!’ It is a short video showing a day in the life of a Pet AT-AT Walker, which is absolutely adorable and really well developed.



Created by Patrick Boivin, this video shows the running around of an AT-AT Walker from the time it wakes up and going through his daily adventures as if it was a new puppy.

Zombie Wedding in Russia

Vitalich and Jirka are a young couple who decided to have their very own special wedding, as zombies. I guess not even death can split-up these two.

Believe it or not, this is the couple’s third wedding so far. Every time they married each other. It sounds strange, I know, but they have reasonably good explanation. Their very first wedding was pretty much what you’d expect a normal wedding to be like. They did it to please their families, but felt they needed to have a new ceremony just for them

The problem was in order to legally get married again, they had to divorce each other. And so they did. Their second wedding was Goth-themed and their most recent one was all about zombies. They got some real cool make-up on, dyed their clothes and asked the same thing from their friends. They consider themselves normal people who just love getting married in the most unique ways.