Red dragon

Amazing responce to yesterdays offering and super comments, most appreciated. It looks like the dragon hunt will be popular, so I will start to plan out how I am going to do it. For full effect, you will have to place the laptop on the floor, bandage your knees and wear a knotted hanky on your head.

A very sad sight met my eyes at the common this morning. The mimosa bush, host to many hundreds of my insect photographs, is no more, ruthlessly hacked down by the motorized rotary blade. It is the pointlessness that irritates me more than anything as the land is not being used for any purpose other than a handful of people who harvest some of the grass for whatever reason.

There is a second large mimosa bush, but its demise is destined, as it is in the path of the destructor. About half the area has now been leveled. The remaining half still has potential for blip material, but this location was really all about the large mimosa bushes. I guess in the scale of things, with fellow blippers suffering serious family illnesses, bereavements and other tragic hardships, this is small potatoes, a mild inconvenience, after all, I was thinking of moving on anyway.

With no bush, I decided to work the grasses and collected some great hopper shots, also a new bug and a few mantis images too. I decided to challenge myself to a red dragon shot. Like the green Sabina dragon, the red dragon is a ground hunter. It finds a perch, hops into the air to snag a passing fly and returns to the same perch.

The method is to scan the grasses 25 feet ahead, for a flash of red, slowly moving in a direction with the sun at my back. Once located, approach and belly crawl the last fifteen feet. If the perch is a flimsy grass stem, it is just not worth the effort, as the dragon will look for a sturdier perch.

I must have been up and down at least twenty times in the ninety session and didn't get closer than four feet. I will happily sell my body for a 200mm tele, but I don't think the sex trade is interested in my wrinkly offering.

I left for home feeling disappointed, frustrated, aggravated and a bunch of other 'ted's, but life is just not that bad. Back at the lab, I was pleasantly surprised at the takings and had a very decent Sabina shot as well as the blipped red dragon. The other images turned out well too, giving me a choice of nine images to blip from.

I chose this image because it was an end view, which is interesting and the simple blooms in the background seem to perk up the image too, hope you like it.

Dave