Hoppy

I think this is probably one of the strangest images I've ever posted, but it cost me so much time and effort to capture it that I now find myself hopelessly attached to it. It's a face-on shot of a Green Leafhopper (Cicadella viridis), which I took at Trench Wood this afternoon, after stalking several of the little beasts back and forth across a small glade for about quarter of an hour. 

The problem with Green Leafhoppers is that they're big - relatively speaking - and powerful, and very disinclined to be approached by potential predators, including the ones carrying cameras. They tend to leap first and ask questions afterwards, and when they spring they can go quite a long way, so you need to either sneak up on them without being noticed, which isn't easy, or corner them in a position where they don't have much room for manoeuvre. (The third alternative would be to net one, pot it, and stick it in the fridge for an hour until it calms down a bit, and don't think I wouldn't if I ever got the chance, but I've never yet found this species in my garden.)

Anyway, when I finally caught up with this individual she was hiding behind this grass stalk and trying to be inconspicuous. Which is hard, obviously, when you're 8mm long, with vivid turquoise wing cases. But she did have an advantage in that every time I tried to get to where I could see her better, all she had to do to maintain our relative positions was swivel around the stem, and I knew that as soon as she saw a chance she'd jump again, so I came up with the wizard wheeze of approaching from the end of the stalk and just seeing what kind of image I could get. This is a single, hand-held shot, processed in Lightroom with minimal fartnarklery.

If the hopper is too weird for you, you might prefer my second photo tonight, which is a final instar Tortoise Bug nymph. Tortoise Bugs were a happy discovery for me last year, but they were still quite newly arrived in the area and I only found two adults - one in my garden, and one at Trench Wood. Today at Trench I must have seen at least a dozen nymphs, so I'm confident in stating that their colonisation of the Shire is going well.