Wild Light

Saturday was the Royal Oak Nature Society’s 2008 Open House at Tenhave Woods and despite the cool and sometimes rainy conditions I managed to crawl on my belly like a reptile to find this ant traversing a serrated leaf edge.

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See an ant in a sea of gold.

One of the great animal artists, here’s a bee painting by Edward Julius Detmold.

See a bee collision.

Early evening by a swampy riverside, a grasshopper prepares for its end-of-day sunset rituals.

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See an ant on the run.

An ant pauses on its journey up a skyscraper stalk, but seconds later was lost to me among the green tangles.

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I’ve found the reincarnation of Harold Lloyd as an ant.

A honeybee worker readying for a foraging adventure navigates the busy hive entrance, illuminated by a shaft of golden sunlight.

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See a bee private eye.

The leaf-filtered sunlight in my backyard reflects off the iridescent wings of a fly.

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See two flies in love.

The close-up tells the story. A chance meeting of young and old, big and small. A Sawfly larva dwarfs an adult fly in this demonstration of a Vulcan mind meld.

A few lines from a Lord Dunsany poem seem to fit:

“And the giant with his club,
      And the dwarf with rage in his breath”

Below is an illustration for the pulp story “The Sky Terror” by the too-little-known artist, writer and designer Hannes Bok (1914 - 1964), one of the artists in the Lovecraft book I’ll be in.

Sky terror indeed. Most wasps are beneficial to humans.

I’ve received my copies of the latest Whisper in the Woods Nature Journal featuring my work, and it looks great. In addition to the front and back cover, there is a portfolio of 17 of my wildlife images, including the diaphanous snail below.

I’ve been getting lots of great feedback, and have been invited to exhibit and give a presentation in northern Michigan this summer. Contact me to get a signed copy of the issue, or subscribe at the Whisper in the Woods website.

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See my illustration for Federico Garcia Lorca’s great poem, “The Encounters of an Adventurous Snail”.

Lit by a brilliant, misty morning sun, a honeybee worker returns to the hive bearing a golden harvest of pollen.

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Experience ultra-cool bee noir in the underbrush.

H.P. Lovecraft must have been impressed with spiders.  In ‘The Shadow Out of Time‘ (published 1936) arachnids are the last life left on the planet.

Here’s another quote from that story: “After man there would be the mighty beetle civilisation, the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world.”