Great photos Scott! What macro lens are you using?
Nikon 105mm Macro on a D7200 body with the SB-900 flash.
So I spent about 30 minutes across the street walking along the dam for our neighborhood lake. It is usually a good spot for getting bug pics, but things are little slow still because a lot of stuff that flowers over there is just now budding. So the spiders and bees are not out in full force yet. There are some dragon flies, damsel flies, some spiders, lots of caterpillars, and some other stuff. To find most of it, I had to just pick a spot, look down at the bushes and not try to focus on anything, letting any movement catch my eye. Then I would get in close to see what was moving. Most of the flying critters were stationary because of the cold front that came through earlier in the day. That helps a lot.
This Dragon Fly let me move stuff out of the way and never flinched. Normally, on a warmer day, it is hard to even get close to them.
This is a Damsel Fly. They are much smaller than Dragon Flies and their wings come out the back of their torso instead of off the top. These are even more twitchy than the Dragon Fly when it comes to getting close to them, but they were less active today as well.
I can't remember what these are called, but we've always called them Katy Deads...
They are maybe 3/8" - 1/2" long and as you can see have no wings. They are shy and as soon as they notice me, they start trying to climb to the underside of whatever they are clinging to. If I am careful, I can put a finger down under them and scare them back topside to get a few shots before they start trying to get away again. I like their eyes.
These guys are EVERYWHERE!! This one was unusually large and fat compared to most. Judging by many of the leaves around it, I am sure it was gorged
These guys are all over the place as well. Once you know how to find them, they are easy to spot. Otherwise, you'd walk right past them and never even notice they were there. They lay tight and flat against the stem or branches of a tall brown plant of some kind. They do spin webs. If they are near the top of the plant, they will tend to pull the tips of the uppermost branches in toward the center, bending them like bows. I'm guessing they are stronger than they look because they are bending some fairly thick branches relative to their size. End to end, they can be about 1-1/2" (females maybe) or more typically about 3/4"-1" (males?). I did see a smaller one pursing a larger one.
This is rotated 90 degrees to make it bigger so you can see more detail.
This is how you usually find them.
Normally, these flies would be all over the place. I think I saw 2-3 the whole time I was out there. This one never budged the whole time I was trying to take the pictures, which is VERY unusual! Normally, even the slightest change in lighting around them or a tiny bump of a nearby plant will set them off.
I only spotted a handful of grasshoppers. Most of them skittered away before I could even get into position to try to get shots of them. For some reason this one seemed content to let me repeatedly pop the flash in its face. It is hard to pick out their eyes because the color of the eye matches the patterns on their body. However, the eyes are actually quite large.
The kids were down behind the base of the dam where the over flow pipe comes out and forms a small pond and feeds into a creek. Looks like it won't be long before the spring batch of frogs arrives! Daniel found an OLD beer can in the woods that held water and had stuffed a mess load of these guys in there, but he did let them all go in the lake.
There were several of these funnel webs that I spotted, but only a few where the spiders were out where I could see them. I couldn't decide which of these images I really liked best, so I decided to just drop them all here and let you decide. Notice I showed up just in time for dinner
I think these are the smaller male versions of this spider perhaps... You will see some pics in a moment of a larger one that I think is a female, the one that was being pursued by one of these smaller spiders.
The remains of what I think was one of the smaller variety.
Purple Vetch? It is starting to bloom and is one of the plants that will be covered in all manner of bugs in short order!
So this is the one I think was the female (bigger butt
) and just larger in general, which is common among insects for some reason. It would let the smaller one get close, then scoot away. I tried and tried to get an in close shot of its face to get better detail of the eyes and appendages right next to the forehead. It has eight main legs like all spiders, but then has at least six more appendages for eating?
The head, with eight eyes, but it is hard to see them all here.
So here you can see the fat thing under the main legs and the smaller one hanging down just in front of that. The fat one is a jointed arm that has sharp prongs on the end. Only the "upper" arm segment is visible here. The smaller one is a longer leg. You can see it better in some of the later images.
Spotted this guy as I was giving up and heading home for dinner. About the size of a lightning bug.