Autumn Zebra

A type of parrot in the aviary by the sea in Timaru. Iridescent green and blue, and yellow.

First another sunrise... One of the cool things about snow is that you can see evidence of everyone who has gone that way before you; the signs they leave behind connect you through time, via space.

Just some not-terribly-good pictures of what I think is some kind of sheetweb spider that I took ages ago - by the look of it I took them inside at night in a plastic container. It is not only a sheetweb spider in that it builds sheetwebs, but is actually one of the Sheetweb Spiders with capital letters. There are 29 known species in NZ of Sheetweb Spiders with capital S's. This is a male because of the longer legs. Like with many spiders, it is written in my book that the males often come inside looking for a mate. I don't know why they all think the women spiders will be living in people's houses.

I found this cicada on the side of our house a month or so ago.

As I was walking home, I saw a very helpful spray-painted message on the pavement - apparently there was an orc somewhere about! That way in fact! The same direction I was going! I feared for my life, but still needed to get home. I looked for the orc down the hill where the next arrow pointed, but saw only bush. I was not attacked by any orcs on the way home, nor saw any other sign of them. Note: the phrase most commonly abbreviated to ORC around here would be the Otago Regional Council, but I didn't see them down there either. I heard they were looking for new headquarters, but a small stream-bed seems less than ideal.

Last weekend they took down a stationary crane that had been working on a building for the last year. This meant of course that they needed another big crane to do so. I stood around in the cold for one hour in order to take these pictures, so you'd better appreciate them! (interesting note: from my observations, I can tell you that crane dismantling spectatorship is an activity practised equally by men and women) These first pics make our city look like it might be bigger, grittier and more generally city-like than it actually is. Note that it was actually about 11AM when I took these, not, say, dawn or dusk or any time that is supposed to be particularly dark. This is the crane doing all the work. Handily it has written on it that it has a 72m main boom, so there you go. It also says it has 32m HYD tilt - but I don't know what that bit means... So the boom of the stationary crane is being supported by the truck-crane, and this guy and his colleague appeared to be using a gia...

The cat caught a cave weta of some type this evening, but I rescued it before it was hurt. Here are some photos; I think it is gorgeous. To start with is the worst photo, but also the most overhead and thus "overview" kind of one. Now, two better ones. It was hard taking photos of it, I couldn't get enough light. I have to work out a better way of taking photos of insects at night (indoors, but I mean there's not enough light for closeups from our lights).

I'm probably possibly going to start writing some more on my blog again, so to start off this burst of activity, here's a picture I prepared a while ago that I don't think I've posted yet. This one has had only a sliver cropped off the side to make it more symmetrical, so is basically as it was taken - it's nice to take a picture that you don't need to change later. Here is ... a dronefly on a flower. And here it is close up (the aforementioned picture cropped around the fly) - looks like a bee. Taken with your everyday type of digital camera (Mum's one), which had a large offset error in the view finder when taking closeups, and it was too bright to see anything on the screen, so I had to "point and guess" to actually get the whole flower in the shot. My new camera has no viewfinder at all because apparently no one wants them when you have the screen, so about 25% of all the pictures I took this weekend were entirely "point and guess" ...

So, moths are generally boring and ugly, and tend to mostly look the same (small and brown-grey) but still the insect books devote large amounts of space to every species of moth you might possibly come across. (They also devote a quite disproportionate amount of space to butterflies; I see one butterfly a year, but they take up one tenth of the book. I used to think I saw a few more, but they turned out to be day-flying moths.) Anyways, yesterday there was an annoying big moth in the house, so I got my special bug-catching plastic container and caught it to put it outside since otherwise they fly around in the bedroom when I am trying to sleep and I can hear them, and sometimes they crash into my head. But then I thought, since it was big and seemed to actually have some markings rather than just being brown, I would look it up in my insect book moth section. And, there it was, quite - fairly anyway - clearly a "slender owlet" moth. Since it had stopped fluttering around ins...

Here's some pics I took of the goose that currently hangs out in the Leith outside the clocktower building.

So, there's these solitary predatory wasps that live in our neighbourhood, and in other places around Dunedin that I always noticed and wandered what they were because they're kind of large, and red-orange. Then this year, when it was summer, or whatever that non-freezing, not-constantly-raining season is, I saw lots of the wasps/the same wasp many times doing all sorts of stuff around the garden. Mostly that stuff was looking for and killing spiders, looking for a nest spot, and then dragging the spider to the nest. One time after it had found itself a spider and dragged it around a bit and then gone off to look for places to put it, I got the camera (which has since been taken by an evil university student) and took pictures of the rest of the dragging process. I also sent two photos to the museum and Anthony Harris at the museum said it was "Sphictostethus nitidus (Fabricius, 1775) with prey, Miturga sp. The wasp is the red spider hunting wasp, in the family Pompili...

No. You shouldn't. See this photo. How much taller is that tree than the house it is in the front yard of?! (left, you can just see the grey roof and a white chimney, I know it is a bad photo to see it in). If you had to remove that tree, you'd need a crane. (Click on the photo to see it bigger; I like this photo) UPDATE: That post was in 2008, now it's 2014. The house went up for sale, and no one would buy it, probably because of the tree. The tree had started to die several months before. The situation remained for a few months until finally the tree was indeed removed with a crane and the house was sold.

Somewhat alarmingly we found this spider yesterday: And this one today: It looks like it is rock-climbing: What's up with all the big spiders? One is not alarming in itself, but two in two days? The second one was smaller than the first. It had legs about 3cm long, and a body about 1.2cm long. Here's a bad picture of the larger first one in a container held in G's hand: For some reason he did not leave it on the wall for me to take good pictures of. The pictures of the second one are better - you can see it's hairy legs, etc - and you can click on them to see big versions! Yay!