Perfect

"Perfect," I said. "Stay right there." Which, happily, he did.

It was only as I homed in on him in t'ai chi mode, shooting on burst, that I registered the panting of a small dog, and realised that a terrier and its owner had frozen on the path behind me, and were also... staying right there. "I'm sorry," I said, without lowering the camera or turning. "I was talking to the cricket - I didn't mean you." "I didn't actually think you did," replied the dog walker, in a tone that suggested I'd have got short shrift if she had, and I suddenly recognised her voice and realised that she was someone I'd known (under quite trying circumstances) in a previous existence, about twenty years ago. Given our history, it was especially decent of her to stop.

This is the third Roesel's Bush-cricket I've found at Tilly's field this week, but he's the first perfect specimen (one of the others had a badly mashed eye, and the other had only one antenna), and the first whose efforts to evade me brought him into a nice position for a portrait shot. He's not quite as striking as the green and yellow specimens that turned up in this field a few years ago, nor as unusual and exciting as the macropterous female I once spotted on the riverbank in Stratford, but I think he's still pretty cool.

R: C3, D9.