Butterfly Garden at Allens Pond

Bumblebees and Skippers

On Columbus Day, Allens Pond Massachusetts Audubon Sanctuary held a beach ramble, which I will discuss in another blog.  Prior to the ramble starting I was looking over the butterfly garden at the sanctuary and on the side closest to the entrance by the stone bench there was a large group of white daisy like flowers.  The bumblebees and different species of butterflies were on them.  Besides a number of skippers (which I have completely identified as yet), there was a a beat-up Common Buckeye, American Copper, Painted Lady and a Clouded Sulfur.  It was nice is sitting on the bench, watching all the butterflies in bees flitting around.  All these pictures were taken with my Nikon D800 with the Nikon 70-200 F2 .8 handheld.

Common Buckeye

American Copper

Clouded Sulfur

Skipippers

Skipper

Skipper

Painted Lady

Painted Lady

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