Lucky

I had a busy and productive day today: I cooked a batch of curry for the freezer, did some domestic accounts, filed a huge pile of paperwork, and (with R's help) cleaned up the filing system on my little Windows laptop. Smug? Well, maybe just a little.

For most of the morning I was encouraged to keep going with my indoor tasks by the fact that the light outside was dire, but after lunch it improved somewhat, so I took the R7 and went on a little bug hunt. And here is one of the little bugs I found: a tiny ruby-tailed wasp, about 2mm in length, that was scouring the buds of a yarrow head. No sudden movements!  I reminded myself fiercely as I crept towards it, but with hindsight maybe I should just have gone for it and homed right in: I only got five shots before it took off and dematerialised, never to be seen again, and this - the best-focused of the set - is still a pretty distant view, even after heroic cropping. Never mind. Even sighting a ruby-tailed wasp is a cause for celebration in my book, and getting a focused shot of one is enough to tip me into a Crash Bandicoot dance.

My yarrow patch gave up numerous different kinds of inverts today, from beetles through bees to moths - plus the nursery web of a Nursery Web Spider, which is the subject of tonight's second photo. I couldn't find the mother spider, though my books say that she will almost certainly have been there somewhere, guarding the web, but I think the little huddle of spiderlings is adorable. The egg sac from which they hatched is inside the web with them, but only faintly visible here through the yarrow stalks.