I saw this female Sonoran Carpenter Bee (Xylocopa sonorina) in an Agave Attenuata and at first thought she was dead. But when I went out to look, she moved a bit, then burrowed deeper into the plants and disappeared from sight. I saw her three days in a row on the same plant and then she must have moved on. I’m not sure exactly what she was doing there. She didn’t appear to be collecting pollen but might have been doing so, albeit very slowly!
I saw this cow on a little hump of land at Pu’u Wa’awa’a and was struck by the pose. It was so bulky and muscular, I thought it was a bull at first. It’s definitely not a dairy cow though. That would be too terrifying to think about.
This week’s Sunday Stills challenge theme is ‘2021 in Your Rear-View Mirror.’ See more responses here. I’ve gone with a favorite photo from each month of 2021, with a caption and link to the post the photo first appeared in.
A long-tailed blue butterfly feeds as it makes its way along a kiawe flower.
Sometimes you have to dig deep to get to the good stuff!
I was going through some old photos, came across this one, and realized I’d never posted it before. This was a gecko that lived in our house a few years ago. We called him Jones because he had a peculiar fondness for ant bait.
Like all geckos, he shed his skin periodically, but on this occasion he was having difficulty getting rid of the old skin around his feet. That’s a problem for a gecko because it meant he wasn’t able to climb around everywhere having lost the ‘stickum’ qualities of his feet. So he would wander around on the floor and once in a while make his way into the bathroom and be unable to navigate the step to get out. So I made this little set of steps for him, shoved it up against the big step, and waited. Jones quickly got the hang of it and used it for several days until he finally shed the last remnants of his old skin.
A metallic skink blends in well as it crosses a rough section of an old road.
Graham's Island 