Shuffling

Today was a pretty dreary one, in terms both of the weather and the stuff I had to do, which primarily involved trying to excavate my desk from underneath several skip loads of festering paperwork. It's possible that I've exaggerated a tiny bit here, but it's sadly true that several hours of my day were consumed by domestic and personal admin, and - horror of horrors - filing.

Around lunch time my attention was caught by a slight improvement in the light outside my study window, and I awarded myself a little break and took the macro off for a walk around the garden. And it's a good thing I did, because within half an hour it was raining. The weather then got steadily worse for the rest of the afternoon, and just before dinner there was even a brief thunderstorm.

I found a few nice inverts on my mini safari, but it seems far too long since I last posted an Oxystoma pomona -  in fact it's almost ten months - so to remedy that, here are two of them. No beating or sweeping was involved - they were just noodling around the photinia, and I snapped them in situ as best I could manage in the Stygian gloom. The female in the second photo was pretty phlegmatic, but the male in the main image was horrified at being papped, and shot off to the edge of his leaf with the obvious intention of escaping. He then shuffled around for a few seconds, doing that adorable weevil thing where they try to get three feet off the ground simultaneously before opening their wings and flying. In the end he managed it, and I did catch the moment, but with a shutter speed this slow the image was a little too blurred to be usable. I don't relish the flash photography months, but I fear they're almost upon me.

If you're not familiar with Oxystoma pomonae (where have you been??), it's a 3mm seed weevil that mainly feeds on vetch. I don't, as far as I can recall, have any vetches in the garden, so why I have so many vetch weevils is a bit of a mystery, but I'm not about to complain. Males are a little smaller than females, and have a shorter and slightly broader rostrum, or snout. Despite the very different angles of these images, if you view them both full-screen you should be able to see that she has a longer gap between the front of her eyes and her antennal insertions than he does, and in front of the antennae her rostrum is more obviously narrowed.

There's more information on Oxystoma pomonae here, if you're interested.