Showing posts with label Ronn's garden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ronn's garden. Show all posts

Sunday, August 2, 2009

The Snowberry Clearwing

Hummingbird moth sounds ordinary. Snowberry Clearwing lifts the little creature to the level of exotic flier.

While I watched for half an hour, this little clearwing flitted from bloom to bloom in Ronn's garden, darting and hovering, zipping and zapping. I never got a decent picture because he never stopped. One photographer described the clearwing as "moving and zipping like a bumblebee on a cocktail of angel dust and caffeine" (http://www.flickr.com/photos/martytdx/196673376/). Another wrote, "I've found that those pesky, hard-to-shoot creatures that fly a lot are easier to get pictures of when you glue 'em down. Seriously, this one was just resting on a squash leaf and let me get a few shots before buzzing off on nectar patrol" (http://www.flickr.com/photos/martytdx/950841128/in/set-72057594108431081/). Not one of my photographs catches the physical beauty of this moth. But several do catch his persistent enthusiasm, his constant movement. Writing a daily snap means taking daily pictures, both of which have taught me this: it's the attending in the moment to what I see that counts, even when I can't recreate either seeing eye -- the photographic one or the language one.