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My little black maynx cat Bear has brought me several live humming birds. She catches them in her mouth, brings them inside and lets them go. I have fun getting them back outside.
From Taz's link: One cool thing about this insect is how her eyes always seem to be looking at you. You can see how in this picture, it seems to have dark pupils that follow you around. Of course it doesn't really. It just has typical compound eyes comprising hundreds of tiny hexagonal cylinders. The cylinders are long and radiate out somewhat spherically, so only the ones pointing toward you appear dark (the color at the other end of the tube).
Woah, I never really noticed and/or thought about that before.
It's not easy to photograph this thing. It scared the hell out of me when I was in really tight (a couple of inches) for a macro shot, and it flew up onto the camera!
One of the cameras I have is this old, old Ricoh 300z digital camera. Not Apple QuickTake old, but same max. resolution at 640x480.
Anyway, one of the really nifty things about it is that it does less than 1cm macro focus without any adapters or doohickies. That's like up inside the little plastic lens shroud. And it does nice macro shots, excellent depth of field effects, crystal-clear tight focus. (For 640x480) Another neat function is a tilting screen, and there's no optical viewfinder. The screen is nice, clear and bright and rather big for it's year and pedigree, and a good set of rechargables can easily fill up a 200 shot card with a bunch of flash shots, with juice to spare.
One day I'm chasing this tiny, tiny little jumping spider around with the thing. The spider could have comfortably fit and run in circles on a #2 pencil eraser.
At some point I guess the spider had enough. It turns around, rears up on it's back legs, puts up it's pedipalps, front legs and fangs and spreads them wide open, and then suddenly and instantly leaps straight into the lens shroud.
I jumped about a foot in the air, screamed like a little girl and nearly dropped the camera off a third story balcony.
Granted, I'm viewing this at about 2.5 to 3 inches, and it looks to me like a fucking plate-sized bird-hunting jumping tarantula just went for my hand like it was lunch, but in reality of course the spider is barely a centimeter wide if it stretched out in all directions.
That was the day I put a lanyard on the camera and developed the nearly unfailing habit of wrapping the thing around my wrist a few times.
photo by splunge
photo by TheophileEscargot
photo by Kronos_to_Earth
photo by ethylene
