Nighthawk and Supermoon (photo A.Shock)

This grainy photo was taken last Sunday in New Mexico.  If you look closely, you can see a bird-shaped smudge soaring past the top edge of the moon.  It’s a Common Nighthawk, hawking insects in the light of the full moon.  The ID isn’t made on the strength of the shape of the shadow, but on something the photo doesn’t show: the bird’s distinctive “peent” call, which we’d been hearing as we stood admiring the enormous so-called “supermoon.” How excellent to later discover the accidental capture of the bird flying between us and the bright moon’s disk!

Here’s what the June supermoon looked like last night, rising over our neighbors’ roof:

(photo A.Shock)

The photo above is  an unmanipulated image (except for a little tweaking of contrast): I shot the moon, the tree, and the roofline as seen, with a tight zoom and digital cropping.

Now for a little fun. Remember? new camera, still learning. I was able to get good shots of a saguaro at dusk and good shots of the moon — just not both in the same frame! The moon indeed came up under this venerable saguaro’s arms from our viewpoint, but “on film” without quite so much lunar precision (at least in camera: it looked a lot like this to the naked eye). Photo-editing software to the rescue! I edited two of the night’s high-detail photos — one of the moon and one of the giant cactus — into one.  Please enjoy the image below, but think of this one as art and not astronomy:

June 22 2013 “supermoon” (composite image A.Shock)

The next “supermoon” is on August 10, 2014; maybe by then I’ll be able to get the shot without benefit of photoshop. In fact, mulling this over, I think I figured out one way to capture both the dim spiny green of the cactus, and the bright silver moon: this may be a job for High Dynamic Range!… And, there’s always tonight, as long as there aren’t any clouds.

Robo-fly or Robber fly? This handsome ærial predator was basking on the parsley in the garden this morning.  I’m armed with a new camera, just getting acquainted, and marauding for likely subjects.  Still learning — in fact, I hadn’t figured out how to shoot in Macro mode at this point, but the standard shooting mode digitally cropped for a zoom did a fair job.  It’s hard to see, but I believe this bird has lunch in its mouthparts; I spy extra wings under the crook of that front leg. And check out the grappling-hook feet!

Robber fly, family Asilidae (photo A.Shock)

No clouds where you are? Get out and look at our Moon this weekend. It’s a Supermoon. And not just any super moon, it’s the superest of the year.

Tomorrow night and the next night the moon will be at its best (that’s Saturday and Sunday, 22-23 June 2013). Here’s last night’s moon — Pre-Super — as a preview (click to enlarge):

Waxing gibbous, 20 June 2013 (photo A.Shock)

The term “supermoon” has recently been coined by media and some astronomers to refer to a full moon that coincides with its closest approach to earth (or perigee). What’s special about a supermoon is that it actually looks a bit bigger in the sky than at other times (although, don’t fall for some of the wacky claims circling the internet about just how big: it’s not going to look like ET’s bicycle moon). For more scientific and understandably presented info, click here.

The Man in the Moon has never shown himself to me.  When I look, I see Quetzalcoatl’s obliging Moonrabbit, her ears at two o’clock, pointing right.  And, why stop at waxing gibbous — let’s wax meta for a moment: Professor Danneru would like to point out the One-Clawed Crab in the Moon, the lunar apparition his mysterious ancient poets saw. That works for me. Can you see the Crab in the Moon?

It’s squishy and voluminous, bulbous-headed and bulgy. Plus, it engulfed every single leaf of a poor little potted chile, covering the soil below with drifts of black frass, but… it’s REALLY GREEN, and I think it’s pretty spectacular, in its way. It’s a hornworm — I’m not sure which — which makes it the larva of one of the Sphinx moths. Two days after I took this photo (do click to enlarge, I loaded a file as monstrously huge as this caterpillar is), it disappeared: it must have plopped to the ground below the plant to bury itself a few inches down in the soil to pupate. Then it will emerge as a moth. I’m trying to imagine what it looks like when a full-grown sphinx moth — a creature of the night air — emerges from dirt. Imagine!

Check the sparse, sparkly polyester-looking hairs on its back, the bristles on the “feet” of its fleshy, blunt prolegs. And the golden “portholes”. What a machine! We’re watering the now leafless chile plant, hoping the frass dissolves and the plant can re-process the nutrients from its own devoured, caterpillar-bypassed leaves to grow more. (Photo A.Shock)

There’s a certain Passionflower vine that grows in an unlikely crack in our pool deck.

Sonoran desert Passion flower, Passiflora foetida, a rambunctious native vine with a weird (but edible) fruit.

It’s the most enduring of all of the tough volunteer passiflora vines that inhabit our yard, exposed to blazing sun each summer afternoon, and even surviving winters with killing frosts, its roots shielded from chill and drought by the aging cement deck. This plant is crammed into the same seam as two other stubborn, spiny volunteers, a Palo Verde tree and a wolfberry, which the vine uses unashamedly for support while clambering up to the sun. This chimæric tangle of species is inconveniently located — crowding an outdoor table and the barbecue grill — but it provides prime nature-watching: towhees scrabble around looking for seeds underneath, whiptail lizards flick their tongues at ants, desert cottontails crouch in its shade, and cactus wrens glean its stems and leaves for insects.

All of the following photos of the Gulf Fritillary’s (Agraulis vanillæ) life cycle were taken on this scrubby Passion flower vine clump in our Phoenix-area back yard. (All photos A.Shock — be sure to CLICK TO ENLARGE, especially the last portrait!)

A single egg like a tiny ear of yellow corn. Each is laid one at a time by a hovering, nimble female Gulf Fritillary. The egg is the size of a dull pencil point.

A spiky red larva hatches from the egg and begins to eat and grow. The bright warning colors and spines advertise its body’s ability to concentrate toxins from passionflower leaves. If not discouraged by a human guardian or natural predator, fritillary larvæ can denude an entire plant in a matter of days. When it’s finished eating, the caterpillar anchors itself to its food plant, hangs head downward, forms a brown chrysalis, and pupates.

A new chrysalis looks like a dead passionflower leaf. Exactly like a dead passionflower leaf.

As the chrysalis nears maturity, it becomes transparent and reveals the new butterfly’s colors. The dark sheath on the left side is the wing. 

The chrysalis splits open, and the new butterfly hangs in the shade, pumping up its wings until they’re sturdy enough to fly.

The adult butterfly’s sole role is reproduction. Never having even take wing, our brand-new fritillary is still on a stem near its split chrysalis when another one lands and mates with it. Egg-laying will begin the cycle over again.

Fritillary face.

Here’s a photo of a bird in a tree, in black and white:

With a little bit of searching, you’ll find the tiny bird, made less obvious by its dark-and-light values breaking up its birdy outline.  This helps it blend well with the aspen leaves and bark. It also helps it to be invisible to any predator with weak color vision, such as nocturnal birds.

Evading hungry owls searching for songbirds on night roosts is a good thing, but during the day this male Red-faced Warbler (Cardellina rubrifrons) needs to be able to advertise his presence, so that rival boys beware and girls know he’s there. His song does this, but so does his high-contrast red and black face.

Fortunately, most songbirds’ eyes are well supplied with color receptors, so what they (and we mammals) see is this >>

(Photo A.Shock, June 2013, Veit Springs, Lamar Haines Memorial Wildlife Area, San Francisco Peaks, AZ. Click either version to enlarge)

Together with his song and active, flitting movement through the trees, his bright colors make this tiny organism a known presence to anyone walking, flying, or trotting through high-altitude mixed deciduous/coniferous forests of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico. It’s a risky gambit: while we were at the Springs, an immature accipiter (most likely a Cooper’s hawk) flew through — a bird-eating predator whose retinas are well-supplied with color-sensing cones.

For a close-up image of a Red-faced Warbler and a recording of its peppy song, click here.