Last year the milkweeds were finally doing well enough that I allowed butterflies to lay eggs on them, as this monarch was doing. I took a bunch of photos of it making its way around the plant, which is nothing you can't find everywhere on the web...but this one, of the animal flying is ever so slightly less common, so I decided, since it's October, and Halloween is coming up, and the trees have, almost instantly it seems, adorned themselves with fall color, to post this.

It's a little blurry at full resolution—my camera isn't really optimized for shooting things that move around under their own power—but good enough to decorate a web page, and I'm in the mood for pretty-happy right now.

This was shot 7aug2011, in my garden. Gimp Unsharp mask, cropping.

This year I had a preying^[1] praying mantis, which pleased me to no end; it's taken the insects awhile, I think, to recover from I suspect were copious bug-killing chemicals applied by the former owner, but the ecological web is slowly strengthening.

Either that, or I'm simply getting better at noticing.

More conventional shot, that I just like because it has flowers/garden in the background (rudbeckia hirta, to be precise.)

Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.