Topical Salve

In flight, not from the rear. Those of you who read this blog regularly (both of you, as of last count) know this to be my Holy Grail of photography. What you may not know is that for the last year or so, I’ve had a particular target in mind: the tarantula hawk.

This is a male. They're big.

Why, you ask, would I want to photograph a 4 cm long wasp that ambushes tarantulas at their burrows, paralyses them, drags the spiders back into their burrows to lie, unable to move, waiting to be consumed by the wasp’s larva when it hatches from the egg laid upon them? I find them striking. And with their iridescent blue bodies and orange wings (and sometimes, antennae), under the right light, it would make an awesome photograph. Plus, there’s also the Everest answer.

What I didn’t fully grasp when undertaking this quest was how truly disconcerting it is to have large wasps winging around your head at close distance (I’ve only got a 55mm lens to play with, so I have to get really close, even with big bugs). Not to mention the females I saw are closer to 5 cm in length. Plus BugGuide says tarantula hawks, while generally non-aggressive, are reputed to have very powerful stings — Don’t want to accidentally bump into one and find out.

This is a female. They're even bigger.

The easiest place to photograph tarantula hawks around me is at the Wild Animal — er, San Diego Zoo Safari Park (don’t know if I’ll ever get used to the name change). The first covered picnic table on the Garden Trail is situated right next to some plants that tarantula hawks absolutely adore. They will hang out on the blooms, drinking nectar for minutes at a time, oblivious of intrepid photographers willing them to take flight.

Like this, only in focus.

And yet fly they do. I had better luck catching the inbound tarantula hawks than waiting for one gorging itself on nectar to take to wing. Though when they fly directly at the camera lens, it’s really hard to stay composed and keep the bug in frame, let alone turn the focus ring and squeeze off some shots.

Gaaah!

Sometimes, autofocus actually works.

Walking around the backyard, I stumbled upon this dragonfly resting on a tree. Since I had gotten pretty close without it flying off, I figured there was a better than normal chance that it would still be there if I went and got my camera. And it was.

Knowing how skittish these hunters of the sky are, I bumped up my ISO setting and slowly approached, photographing as I went. When I got as close as I dared, I started inching the camera closer, peering through the viewfinder, keeping the center autofocus point on the insect’s thorax. Oh, for a camera with a large LCD and live view (not to mention a large macro lens)!

I got nearly full arm extension before the dragonfly got fed up with my shenanigans and flew away.

The original photo has the full body of the dragonfly in frame, but I think this cropped version is much more interesting.

“Find your own flower, bub.”

In the middle of January in Southern California, the hardest working flying insects appear to be the bees. Take this lady for example. She’s so focused on nectar gathering that she doesn’t even notice the line of pollen hanging from her foot, clinging to her like a strip of toilet paper trying to escape a public restroom.

Things you don’t see a lot of where I live:

1) Temperatures of 38C (100F) in November.
2) Mantids in Greek cafes.

Yesterday I saw both. Perhaps the mantis was there to get out of the heat and sample the falafel?

Once again, my macro shot of an insect is in soft focus. I can blame the camera this time, though. No manual focus capability on my phone.

I half expected this insect to either jump onto my phone or fly onto to my hat while I was taking its picture.* Instead it stoically posed for me, then scampered up the glass once I was done.

* If you subscribe to the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, then there exists some universe where I was screaming like a little girl whilst flailing my arms about in public (in 38C heat, no less) yesterday, much to the amusement of my lunch companion.

Damselfly. Named such because of its penchant for playing coy, luring intrepid insect photographers close, then flying away just before coming into focus only to land close by, enticing the photographer to try again and again in a cruel, flirtatious dance.*

And like their namesake (and pretty much anything else), they photograph best in morning or evening light. Except when flying, and shutter speed is king.

* I could be wrong.

In flight. Not from the rear. (In focus goes without saying.) That is the Holy Grail of photography for me.

Using the hummingbird equivalent of crack cocaine to attract the photography subject and get them to ignore their fight-or-flight response to a large lens looming a couple beak lengths away feels like cheating, though.

Gift horse. Mouth. Averting my eyes, and pressing the shutter button.

Me (back from a walk in the forest): I’m back.
Wife: Did you put on insect repellent before you went out?
Me: That would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t it?

Upon spying a 2 cm tuft of red fur crawling through the grass, the following thoughts crossed my mind:

1) I wish I had my camera.
2) What IS that thing?
3) Bright colors. Hmm… Probably shouldn’t touch it.

While observing it, the tuft started burrowing into the lawn. Fortunately, it being Southern California with watering restrictions being imposed by the city since last summer (one good thing about droughts, I guess), the ground was quite solid, and resisted its efforts. This afforded me the opportunity to go grab my camera.

When I returned, the red tuft had not made any progress. Unfortunately, burrowing into a lawn does not a good photograph make. Obviously, the next step was to coax the little red tuft to higher ground. Recalling thought #3, I found a small stick and started prodding at the red tuft. Prodding the abdomen did nothing for me — it tried even harder to burrow into the lawn. So I moved the stick to where I estimated its head to be and started poking away. This seemed to irritate the red tuft to no end. It started the insect equivalent of screaming at me — rubbing two abdominal plates together that let off a high pitched shrill. My perseverance was finally rewarded when the little red tuft backed out of its much-too-shallow burrow and started crawling across the lawn to get away from me.

I put down the stick and madly worked the focus ring of the camera while trying to get in front of the remarkably-quick-for-its-size red tuft. After many tens of photos, and an incursion far deeper into my neighbor’s yard than I intended, I withdrew from the red tuft and let it go on its way.

Back inside the house, after deleting the out-of-focus images (read: most of them), the hunt was on again. This time to answer thought #2. Bugguide.net informs me that the red tuft is a velvet ant — genus Dasymutilla — though I’m not able to guess a species based on the photos in their database. The thing is, it’s not actually an ant. It’s a wasp. The wingless ones, like the one I was pestering in the lawn, are the females (my Star Trek-inspired excuse for keeping the picture even though she’s in soft focus. Plus, you know, red shirt.). They crawl around looking for ground-dwelling bees’ nests or other wasp’s nests in which to lay their eggs. The velvet ant larvae either feed on the hosts, or the food stockpiles of the hosts.

All very interesting, but that’s not what gave me pause. What gave me pause was the other common name for the velvet ant — cow killer. It gets this name from its ability to inflict a sting so sever it is said to be able to kill a cow.

Kill.

A cow.

Sure, it’s most likely hyperbole (not willing to test that theory myself, thank you), but still. This is probably not an insect you should be handling (kudos to me for thought #3!), or pissing off by prodding it with a stick (um…), then getting nose-close to, to take macro photos of.

… Yeah.

… and a girl and a boy and a girl and another girl and another boy and …