Last year's tadpole makes this year's frog...newly grown to froghood and thus able to sit out in the sun on a lily pad, this little frog isn't as big as he will be (if nothing eats him) in a few weeks. Behind him, a waterlily flower-bud emerges from the depths like a menacing submarine's snout.
Just one of the strange flies hanging around at Owl Pavilion today. Red eyes, yellow on the face, interesting markings on the body, iridescent wings showing a lot of red...and much smaller than a housefly.
What's this weird-looking critter crawling on the greenbriar? At first, from a little distance, we thought it must be two beetles mating. But as I got closer, I could see it was all one BIG beetle.	It's an eyed click beetle, Alaus oculatus.
Improving on good luck: When the male scissortail started his aerial dance, I tried to catch a picture of him in flight, tail spread, while still steadying the big lens on the monopod. The only shot I caught had him at the top lefthand corner of the image space, like this.	Ruta gave me a quick lesson in how to expand the canvas in Paint Shop Pro. Then I cloned the sky, line by line, using a straight-edge held horizontally against the screen to ensure that I was capturing the same elevation. This enabled me to match the subtle shading (though, since the bird was small relative to the whole image, there may not have been much.) from top to bottom to match the subtle shading, to create more sky on the left, recropped, and messed with the histogram adjustment to show more of the underside of the bird.
And voila! Here's the scissortail showing off, with plenty of air around him, just as he had in reality.
Bonus on the way home--this Prince Baskettail, Epitheca princeps, posed in an Ashe juniper. They curl the tips of their abdomens up (unlike some other species).

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