It took me awhile to find anything truly interesting.  I dug around in the soil for a bit but gave up on that as I was more in the mood of catching something on a leaf.  While there are quite a few interesting creatures that live in the soil, due to the background it can be difficult to get the artistic edge in shots.

After about 45 minutes of searching through bushes, I found an interesting one between two small ponds.  There I found what at first looked like white midges flying around.  I have plenty of midge shots but decided to take some shots anyway and I am very pleased with the shot above.  I always fear when I get an insect in a good location that it will take off before I get a chance but this one stayed for a number of frames.  Of the frames I think I like the one above the best.

The following is a better look at the midge itself.

Of course, I am not absolutely sure that this is a midge.  I could not find it in any of my books but other than the coloring it looks similar to midges I have seen around my house.

All in all it turned out to be a successful day!

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I also learned a new trick.  One thing to make sure to not do when photographing flies is to get in their light.  I played around with this one to see how much it does truly matter.  Sure enough, whenever I stood in its light, the fly took off.  Therefore I approached from a direction such that my lens would not cast a shadow on the fly.

However, I found that it wasn’t in a very good position to get a shot.  So I leaned a bit to the side in order to cast a shadow just to the edge of the fly.  Sure enough, it moved a little bit and turned to get this shot.

Also that day, I found a cool looking springtail.  I’m not sure the name of it, though it shouldn’t be too hard to look up given the interesting markings.  I found it on our shed while looking at midges.

I also found this on the composting bin.  It looks like another midge, though the legs appear longer than the ones I normally see.  Perhaps it had to spread them out longer due to the material.

I also found my friend, the six legged spider, in her normal location.  I took a few shots, but none came out this time.  All in all, things are speeding up right now and I have a feeling there will be more and more interesting things outside!

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I didn’t bother photographing them for very long because there weren’t that many of them, I already have a number of photographs of midges, and there weren’t any midges in really great photographic position.

Nevertheless, that didn’t prevent several mysteries from cropping up.

The first mystery came about when examining the photo about.  On the right side of the midge (its left) there is some kind of sac protruding.  This does appear to be a female midge (the males have a decorative head piece) so my first question is – what is that?  I do not have any detailed information on midges, so I can only guess.  Perhaps it is an egg?  A parasite?

As I mentioned before though, I only noticed this afterwards.  I felt I was done photographing midges for the day when I ran across this one.

Unfortunately my shots did not come out as good as I would have liked, but in this case I found a male midge (notice the head piece) drinking what appears to be a drop of water.  I am at least assuming that this is a drop of water, but could be mistaken.  Here’s a closer look.

This makes me wonder – is this nothing more that the midge is thirsty and wants a drink, or is this something more?  The midge was very preoccupied with this activity – letting me get a number of shots off.  Unfortunately the headdress makes it very difficult to get a close focus on the eyes.

What makes me question whether this is something more is after reading For Love of Insects, I learned that in many species the male insect obtains a specific set of chemicals from various sources, which he then presents as a ‘gift’ to the female.  Without a gift, no mating occurs – so the male is highly motivated to obtain the chemicals.  These chemicals often serve as protection for the insect – making it unpalatable to many predators.  When the male provides these chemicals to the female, the female uses some of them for her own protection and passes others to the eggs.

Therefore, I wonder whether the midge has found these chemicals here.  Perhaps the drop isn’t just water but is something from the plant – for instance the midge poked a hole in a vein.  This is all guessing of course.  I do not know what the true answer is.

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I found this small centipede in some leaf litter I was going through and decided that was not the most photogenic place for it.  Therefore I found this flower nearby and placed it on top.  The centipede seemed rather confused and wandered around the flower for a bit, before I placed it back in the leaf litter.  It’s probably the equivalent of someone putting us an Mars – we would likely wonder – “where the heck are we?” (note: I am assuming whoever did it was kind enough to give us a space suit or else we wouldn’t have much time to think).

I have no idea what type of centipede this is, except that they are common around here – this isn’t the first one like this I have seen.  My current guide books do not go in depth on centipedes – so some day I will need to pick up a book that deals with them.

This is another shot of it on the other side of the flower.

This is a midge, which look like mosquitoes but don’t bite.  They are very easy to photograph because they tend to sit still for periods of time.  For more on midges, read a post on them.

Finally, I don’t always shoot insects, so here are two other shots I took that day.  I’ll end for the weekend with them.

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However, a certain little insect decided that it wanted its photo taken and settled down right next to my shoot.  Perhaps it had heard that I was photographing insects in the area and wanted a portrait.  Who knows, but I was unable to resist the temptation to photograph it.

To be honest,  I haven’t spent much time trying to identify it.  It certainly looks like a midge, similar to those I blogged about some time ago.  This one stayed quite still for me, so I decided to try getting it in a dew drop.  Unfortunately there were no dew drops with a proper angle that I could have gotten the shot.  I tried to move one to the proper position but failed miserably at the attempt.  Instead, I decided to move the primrose behind the midge and see how that would turn out.

Personally I think this helped the shot, and I may try it again in the future.  The red of the primrose may have been a bit too strong here though.  I also think the two blades of grass are a bit distracting.  I tried to remove them when shooting but I was too worried I would scare away the midge so I left them.  I would be curious to hear other opinions – did the background help or hurt the midge shot?

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However, there are insects to be found at this time of year. Woodlice are as common as ever and centipedes and spiders are also not difficult to find. Recently I have also noticed an increase in springtails that will be the subject of a blog in the near future. So far there are no ants or much in winged insects but I suspect that will change towards the end of February. However, I have seen a marked increase in the number of midges.

One of the nice things about macro photography is, until recently, I had no true idea what a midge is. From the Wikipedia article the term “midge” is a rather generic term that refers to a number of relatively unrelated families of insects. According to Insects Their Natural History and Diversity, midge “is a kind of handy term to refer to the little flies that a happy motorcyclist gets to scrape off his teeth after a summer night’s ride”. While a number of them look like mosquitoes, they lack the long needle that mosquitoes use to puncture the flesh to draw blood. Here in the Pacific Northwest, the midges I have come across are a non-biting variety and are quite harmless. In other parts of the world the midges do bite and there are even theories that parts of Scotland are not strongly populated due to the presence of the midge.

It seems that the local midges here love the barn in my backyard because whenever I look I can find a number of them resting on the outside of it, and even more caught in the spider webs hanging from the roof. The majority of the midges hanging on the barn are very easy to photograph. They don’t mind the lens getting so close and I even lightly poked one to make sure it wasn’t dead. Perhaps they are in a breeding mode or resting during the day – I’m not quite sure why they hang on the side of the barn for hours on end.

For those of you wondering what a midge (at least here) looks like, the following is a shot.

In particular I get a kick out of the “hairdo” on top of their heads. The following is a closer shot of “the do”.

According to one of my insect books, this signifies that the midge is a male. If this is true, then the logical consequence is this image is a female

Some midges are considered to be garden pests. Perhaps these ones are as well. I have noticed a number of pieces of leaves missing on some of my plants, but so far it has been difficult to determine what has been eating them. Besides, due to my photography habits I do not allow anyone to spray pesticides in the yard. Sometimes my wife gets a bit upset about this. I offered to purchase a bunch of praying mantids to help keep the insects down but she knows my true aspirations are to get some good mantid shots. J

Whatever they are doing, they are so impartial to their surroundings that they let me get close enough to them to get shots like this.

After some research, I found that this midge, as with many others, belongs to the family Chironomidae. This is a huge family with 2,000 members just in North America and are very common during the winter. So, the next time I hear the word “midge” I will be able to put a picture to the word!

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