affable-lurking

It’s a flying ant day here in London. The parks and pavements have been covered in large, brownish, winged & wingless females looking for somewhere to start a new colony.

Winged female

Winged garden ant female after nuptial flight.

Wingless female

Wingless female garden ant, after nuptial flight. Stubs of wings visible on second body segment.

Some of the smaller males are also around, looking for a place to die. Their job of fertilizing the females is now over.

Male garden ant

Male black garden ant dying on the ground after his nuptial flight.

Of course, all this flying protein is far too good a resource to waste,

Lunch on the wing

You can wait for it to come to you…

Pro-active ant catching.

Or you can take a pro-active attitude to catching your dinner

The Parthenon:

Changing the guard - High kicks are a Must:

Storks and streets in the kasbah.

At a visit to the LWC today, I saw a heron stalk, catch and eat a mouse-thing. Luckily I had the camera.

The Stalking.

The Catch.

The Payoff.

And swallow.

Now I have an xray machine to play with at work, I can take photographs of the insides of things. I shall make full use of this. Here’s an old transistor to start with.

Image details : Mullard OC44 PNP Germanium transistor, glass envelope. 90kV polychromatic xrays, filtered with 1.5mm Al and 0.2 mm Cu. CsI scintillator, 6 sec exposure.