Sophonia orientalis
Irvine, 2009-07-16
This introduced species from Taiwan shows up on my balcony occasionally. It’s a little less than half a centimeter long. The spots on its hindquarters are fake eyes. In the field at night they really do look like eyes, and consequently the bug appears to walk backwards.
Read the rest of this entry »
If this blog goes dark, you’ll know why. This always scares me. I wish WordPress had reliable XML export and import, not SQL.
All done. Automatic upgrade failed, but manual upgrade seems to have succeeded. Holler if you notice any problems.
Here’s one I just found at San Joaquin yesterday, so the ID’s still a little hesitant; but I think it’s Hodges#4866, Abegesta reluctalis. Could also be a similar species in the genus. Thanks to Maury J. Heiman for the ID.
This picture is quite a bit larger than life size. The moth itself was less than a centimeter.
Read the rest of this entry »
I was reading Arthur Morris’s blog today when I noticed that he was shooting with wildly different settings than I was. He seemed to be using a wide open aperture, and a relatively high 400 ISO even in sunlight, while relying on the camera to eliminate grain. This let him shoot with shutter speeds as fast as 1/2000 of a second. He had much better lenses than I did, but I still thought it might be worth a try, so I took a quick spin around the ponds at Mason Park in the late afternoon and see how this did. My lens would only open up to f/6.3 at 300mm–his could get as wide as f/4–but it did make a big difference as seen in this photo of a Western Bluebird:
Western Bluebird
Tamron 28-300 Di VC on an EOS 50D body, ISO 400, f/6.3, 1/2000s
I didn’t realize how much I missed New York graffiti until I actually saw some this weekend on the “ampitheater” in Mason Park:
Irvine is such an antiseptic and boring town. It needs more of this. It’s not like anyone was using that wall for anything else.
Read the rest of this entry »
Lately I’ve been turning on my 2nd floor balcony light in the evening after dark to see what shows up. This was a particularly active individual that was crawling around the walls. It’s about the size of a large ant.
Leucogoniella californica, Hodges 1848
2009-07-27
This is just one of several new moths I’ve tallied without evening stepping outside my front door. It doesn’t seem to have previously been recorded in Orange County, and this may the the first BugGuide record.
Read the rest of this entry »
