One Hundred Meters

August 30, 2006 | Laughing Knees | 16 Comments 

Two cab­bage but­ter­flies mat­ing on a leaf be­side the Noh River, Au­gust 07, 2006

In the heart of a big city like Tokyo the cliché says that na­ture ex­ists as but an af­ter­thought. For such hulk­ing carbon-​​units as us hu­mans that may well seem like the case, but all it takes is a slow­ing of pace and a pair of good eyes to see that the world around us, all of it, IS na­ture; we just have to learn how to see.

At the start of Au­gust, one cloudy day, in the midst of my summer-​​long hia­tus from work, I de­cided one day to walk to the nearby Noh River and see what I could see. When I reached the banks I found my­self slowly down to a crawl, barely mov­ing along. These pho­tographs are the re­sult of nearly four hours step­ping through the river­side grasses and bushes along a dis­tance of only about 100 me­ters. What I ac­tu­ally saw far out­num­bered what I cap­tured in the cam­era. With the wind and light many of the pic­tures were ei­ther im­pos­si­ble to get, or else would have been un­in­ter­est­ing. If I had stayed longer no doubt I would have seen a lot more.

(What you see on-​​screen may look like washed-​​out pho­tographs. The ac­tual ver­sions have much greater con­trast, tone, and sat­u­ra­tion. If you are us­ing an LED screen you may want to tilt it back a lit­tle to al­low more con­trast and a darker im­age to show. The dif­fer­ence can re­ally make the pho­tos stand out.)

Stinkbug bal­anc­ing atop frond.

Grass Lizard basking

This is ac­tu­ally a fiery red and yel­low lily… I was amazed when I de­sat­u­rated it and found this al­most in­frared film-​​like ghost of an image.

Male Red Drag­on­fly. This pho­to­graph took for­ever to get be­cause the twig quiv­ered at the slight­est breeze and the foot­ing at the edge of the river was so cov­ered with dead reeds that I couldn’t see where my feet were.

I love the au­da­cious­ness and tough­ness of Frit­illery But­ter­flies. They al­ways seem to be the first to ap­pear in the cold of mid-​​spring and the last to go at the end of autumn.

Call them the al­ter egos of those reg­u­lar black-​​spot-​​on-​​red bee­tles you usu­ally see.

Rob­ber­fly. Heavy-​​flying thugs of the in­sect world, they’ll go at any­thing that moves, in­clud­ing us, if they’re not aware that we are stalk­ing them.

Jump­ing Spi­der. I once con­sid­ered study­ing field bi­ol­ogy so that I could spe­cial­ize in these spi­ders. They make no trap webs, but wan­der about jump­ing in­cred­i­ble dis­tances and us­ing their sin­gle strand of web as life­lines. It’s al­ways de­light­ful to watch their coke-​​bottle eyes gog­gling at things even two me­ters away.

Barely two cen­time­ters long, this butterfly’s wing color did not be­come ap­par­ent un­til I was al­most stand­ing over the but­ter­fly and it sud­denly opened its wings. I wish I knew the name of the species.

And fi­nally, one of my fa­vorite im­ages. An im­ma­ture fe­male Pray­ing Man­tis among some peppermint.