The female Wolf Spider is an amazing mom. She carries her egg sac by her spinnerets everywhere she goes for approx. 3 weeks. After that her young will live on her back (100s of spiderlings) for approx a week (until the first molt). She will defend her sac and her young vigorously.

Wolf Spiders in love. This is a mating pair. When I first encounter this pair I thought the male was confused. The sperm is actually stored in the male’s pedipalps which would explain the position.

Now this is a Burrowing Wolf Spider which looks nothing like the others pictured here. This one had a body length of approx 5mm. This spider was actually spinning sand balls. Pretty fascinating to watch!

A good rule of the thumb to follow: If you respect nature the animals even insects will respect you. Do not try to handle Wolf Spiders as they can bite and the bite will be painful.

This is my friend’s sweet Bearded Dragon. She is an adult Bearded Dragon and not only is she beautiful but my what personality! I want one so bad now!

I had to get out of the house and step away from my post processing work flow before I completely lost my mind. I thought my trip had been in vain until I came across this tiny critter. I will be uploading it to bugguide for an id and will post an update here. Only approx 7mm long and blending in with the grass I almost did not see it. Had it not jumped I would have come home empty handed today. My guess it is Genus Opeia but hey I am just the photographer not an Entomologist.

For those following are mystery Larva it is still alive and well. I do believe it is about to pupate now so it is only a matter of time and we see who is right ;o). I still believe it will be some species of spider hawk (due only to the solitary egg/larva) but the experts believe it to be a beetle of some sort.

34th Annual National Indian Timber Symposium (ITC) held in beautiful Mescalero NM.

As I process the photographs from the event they will be available online on Flickr

Please use my contact form if you know the names of people I do not have documented or if I got a name wrong. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me either.

You know Spring is officially here when my turtles wake up from their long winter sleep. I wonder how we would look if we went without a bath or food for 6 months. I bet we would not wake up so happy but doubt we would wake up at all…lol.

This is Charlie and he is the middle child. He has always been has always been the first to wake up to eat and drink. Clarkie is up too but I did not get any good shots of her as she wanted to soak in her pond the whole time. Willie Scott is still asleep but she should be up soon (she is the lazy one).

I always look forward to seeing my turtles wake up. I always worry about them during their hibernation and have to resist constantly digging them up to check on them. So far everyone appears to be real healthy this year which was not the case for poor Clarkie last year who woke up with an ear abscess. I will try to get some shots of my baby “girl” (the vet thinks she is a girl but she is still pretty young) tomorrow and Willie once she decides to get up.

Oh how I love spring!!

When I saw this spider I thought it was a brown recluse. I have never seen a recluse and every time I see a spider with this “violin” shape I think omg could this be it..lol. I did learn something interesting about spiders from the kind folks at bugguide. Those round looking exhaust pipes coming out the backend are called spinnerets (something a recluse does not have). Did you know that a recluse has only 6 eyes where most spiders have 8? Wow, the things you can learn just from taking pictures! Just goes to show you that one needs to learn their spiders before they kill them, some are very beneficial and can easily be mistaken for ones that can be harmful.

These were taken yesterday. This was a wonderful and friendly little bug. This critter was very curious about my camera wanting to get closer with each picture. What really struck me as a bit “odd” was how harry this bug is, when you look at them with the naked eye you really do not see it.