Dragonfiles of varying size (the one pictured above is a Blue Dasher) were swarming all over Huntley Meadows park this morning. There are over 5,000 types of dragonflies around the world, I saw about 20 or so different types today. They have large compound eyes and four wings that move independently, allowing them to hover and fly backwards.  Their legs are used for grasping, they cannot walk on their legs.

The snapping turtle below was huge.  The photo shows just the head of the turtle. I don’t think I’d want to be in the water and see this guy headed towards me.

Last week a lizard, this week an Eastern Box Turtle appeared at my house. This fellow was cutting through my yard when it encountered the fence line. After a couple of attempts to fit through the space between the fence boards, it decided a better course of action was to bury itself under a pile of pine needles and get out of the mid-day sun. It’s best to leave turtles alone and not move them, unless they are on a road. Then you should move them directly across the road in the same direction they were traveling.

It’s nice to see a lot more Black-capped Chickadees at my feeders this year.  Over the last several years, the population had apparently decreased quite a bit and seeing a chickadee was fairly rare, but this year I see them on a daily basis.

The American Five-lined Skink (AKA blue-tailed skink) is one of the most common lizards in the eastern U.S., but sightings in my neighborhood are pretty rare, so I was surprised to open my front door today and see this guy (gal?) standing outside my door.  I went back in and grabbed my camera and when I returned, I found this skink to be pretty camera shy as he ran up a tree in my front lawn. Eventually he seemed to get used to me and came back down the tree as I snapped photo after photo.  In fact he soon ignored me completely and went about his business of catching a meal, which he did and even carried back to my front door.

Now, below, doesn’t he look like he can’t wait to dig in to his meal?…which he did, right on my ‘Welcome’ mat!

This morning, Huntley Meadows park had a number of youngsters around including female Blue-winged Teals and the juvenile Green-backed Heron above.  I watched this heron for over an hour as it successfully found meals in the wetlands on a pretty frequent basis.  Also in the park were numerous varieties of butterflies and dragonflies such as the Monarch butterfly and the Bluet damselfly below, both common in the park right now.

It hit 95 degrees today and I was in Mason Neck State Park looking for subjects to photograph.  Not much was stirring so I decided to head into the woods (and out of the sun) to practice some techniques using the available features of my camera.  One of the features allows for multiple exposures to be taken and combined together in camera. The photograph above is a combination of ten exposures taken by moving the camera up just a little for each exposure. Makes an interesting, painting-like effect.

Even though it was very hot, it didn’t deter the female bluebird below from working hard to provide lunch for her little ones waiting inside a birdhouse in the park.

I’ve been spending the last couple of weeks photographing in my backyard. It certainly saves on gas.  My backyard is no national park, in fact my house sits on less than a tenth of an acre. It’s a tiny piece of land, but you hang a couple of bird feeders and plant a few flowers…. suddenly  you’ve got a lot of things to photograph.  Like this bee on a Black-Eyed Susan flower.  At least I thought it was a bee until I looked it up in my National Audubon Society field guide on insects and learned this is a fly, the American Hover Fly to be exact. It drinks nectar and is beneficial to garden flowers for its aphid control. Notice the pollen sticking to its legs. Photograph taken with a 105mm f/2.8 VR lens.