Animal Macro's at the Butterfly Garden of Allens Pond

American Copper

I have been photographing macro subjects recently and a great location is the butterfly garden at Allens Pond Massachusetts Audubon Sanctuary.  Not only can you get flowers in bloom, but there are the berries and seedpods, which give you interesting subjects.  Those subjects will be the topic in a later blog.  On my last visit, there were grasshoppers, butterflies, a crane fly and garden snails.

Crane Fly

The grasshoppers blog to the genus Melanoplus and there are at least 238 species in North America and the only way to tell different species apart is differences in the male genitalia.

Melanoplus sp.

Melanoplus sp.

Sachem Skipper

I have written a previous blog about the garden snails http://photobee1.blogspot.com/2012/09/garden-snails.html, I also found one snail that I could not identify, and it has a different looking shell from the common varieties of garden snails

Brown-lipped Garden Snail

Unknown snail, notice the different shell from the Brown-lipped garden snail