Orange-spotted Jewelweed (the leaves are treatment for poison ivy)

As I wrote in yesterday's blog, prior to the Beach Ramble, I spent my time mostly around Allens Pond butterfly garden photographing macro subjects, insects and plants. My equipment was Nikon D810, Tamron 180 mm macro lens and the Nikon R1C1 Wireless Close-Up Speedlight System, handheld. To an macro photography, you must be patient, wait, and always return to where you have been before. Why do I say that, on a second walk around I found northern walkingsticks hidden in the low aspect of plants. After taken the photographs calming reviewing and deleting the out of focus pictures, the next hardest part is to identify what species you have found. Sometimes you only can get down to two what family. It belongs to. I have a number of field guides, which I use for us to help me and also there are a number of sites that are available for identification purposes. Bugguide at www.bugguide.com is free to join and you can post photos of insects and spiders and people will identified them for you. For wildflowers I use http://www.mywildflowers.com/identify.asp and https://gobotany.newenglandwild.org/. Even with this help. There are many times it is almost impossible to identify what you photographed. Eventually, most of the time you can find out an answer. So get out early and photograph the small natural world around us.