Jazzy

For most of today the photo I've posted as an extra was going to have been my blip, but then I went on a final walk around the garden and found this spittlebug, and... well, you know how I feel about hoppers. Admittedly, it's only three days since I last posted one, but that little guy was very drab, and I photographed him in abysmal light, whereas this one (by the standards of common froghoppers) is almost jazzy, and although the ISO here is still pretty high, the light in the yard this afternoon was kinder by every measure.

My second subject is a speckled bush cricket, taking a late breakfast in the front garden this morning after I'd ejected him from my study. R discovered him sitting on the lower frame of one of the sash windows, while closing up in preparation for us going out, and called me over to see what he assumed was a grasshopper. "Is it macropterous?" I asked (not having my glasses on at the time, so as to be able to judge species, wings, or genitalia), and then, having remedied the long-sightedness situation and established that it was a flightless male bush cricket, "How did he do that??"

Given that he can't have flown, I can only assume that he walked up the front of the building and in through the open window, but on questioning he declined to confirm or deny this. Certainly though, his grip would have been up to the task: I removed him from the house via the time-honoured equipment of an up-ended glass and a piece of card, but when I got outside, removed the card, and shook the glass, he stayed exactly where he was, clinging to its floor in apparent defiance of the laws of physics. In the end I persuaded him out by putting the glass over this very battered rudbeckia bloom. He gingerly stepped onto it, and then in short order began eating the petals.

This evening, to my great relief, we finally had several hours worth of heavy rain, and having made sure that it wasn't actually raining in, I left the windows open, just for the pleasure of smelling the petrichor. For a while we even had thunderstorms rolling around us, which made me personally happy but had me worrying about this baby barn owl.