I got a few strange looks heading out with a macro lens in early September. True, it’s not the invertebrate bonanza that August is, and for the first half hour or so it was all flies and snails. BUT, I like that it forces you to take a closer look at things, so I stubbornly carried on searching.
Eventually I struck gold, finding a common wasp (think this is right, as it doesn’t have the three dots on its face, but happy to be corrected) sitting still on a small tree. Being by far the prettiest thing I’d seen all day I stayed with it for some time, only to notice it was involved in a battle with the trees’ ants. They’d slowly walk up to their vespid cousin, then attack it until the wasp caught them in her mandibles and unceremoniously tossed them out of the tree. Considering there were always a few other ants nearby they showed remarkably little interest in going to help out (come on guys, you can see that your sister is grappling with a yellow and black beast at least three times her size), but there are many things ants do that I don’t understand.
Just goes to show that you can see cool small stuff regardless of the fact that it’s a drizzly Autumn morning. Still, now I’m back in the seasonal north I think its the last time my beloved macro will be coming out for a spin till the spring. Now where’s that 55-300…
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