a little wild   (a small slice of wildlife)

Identified for me as a cuckoo bee, Nomada:

I believe this is a spring azure butterfly (Celastrina ladon).  Beautiful color when the wings are open, but I couldn’t quite catch that.

This was an April Fool’s Day in several different ways.  The weather resolutely refused to acknowledge the spring season: pouring rain and then lots of snow.  Perfect weather for a walk in the woods!

Once I got to Devil’s Rock, I decided to try for a particular type of photograph — I really really wanted a photograph of a drop of water falling off a branch.  The drops  of water, on the other hand, were not particularly cooperative.   They either dropped before I was ready, or refused to drop, or timed the drop so that it didn’t come out right.  The one time everything else worked, of course, I had moved my camera out of the focus zone, so I got a beautifully composed shot of a bunch of blurs in flight.  At first I was annoyed, then enraged, and finally filled with grudging admiration for the perverseness of nature.

There are a few photos here that were reasonably successful; I also want to post my failure here, mostly because they took a lot of work to obtain, but also because they’re interesting failures.

My favorite from this set:

Some of the more conspicuous failures: