Photography has been great for making me actually slow down and look rather than blindly walk past, and for seeing things in a different perspective. I can't believe how many different critters are in the garden since discovering the hidden world of bugs through the camera's macro lens.
Just the number of species of spiders in my tiny garden alone has me gobsmacked, so I thought I'd write some blogs, or 'blugs', featuring some of the different minibeasts I have found, photographed and learnt about.
To encourage bugs to the garden this year I worked on creating a wildflower patch and bug motel from junk in around the property. I bought a leaf cutter bee house and larvae (which unfortunately have not seemed to hatch, so will be going back to the distributor for advice). I planted stinging nettles and milkweed for caterpillars and flowers suitable for butterflies and other nectar feeders.
To help me learn about what I was photographing, there's a great website called iNaturalist.NZ And noooo it's not a nudist fan club. It's the NZ window of the global iNaturalist and you can use it to record your observations of flora and fauna, get identifications, help others identify species, and talk with other NZ nature enthusiasts. It gives me an added incentive to get out and about, and the phone app is very well done.
Through this site I found out that one of the birds I photographed was raised in the zoo and released in Stillwater and is 21 years old, and one of the bugs I photographed was only discovered a few years ago by the person who identified it on the website for me.
Below is my 'Year in Review' which iNaturalist.NZ produced, and it shows what I managed to record this year. It has some pretty good graphical analytics if you are interested in that sort of thing (it's the favourite part of my real job) https://inaturalist.nz/stats/2018/linda_g
So look out for my future blugs, who knows, perhaps it will make you less squeamish of that spider, adore that weevil and maybe love that Weta, even just a teeny bit...
brb