Formica subsericea

This photo was taken in 2007 but the ants were only identified today at bugguide.net. The identifier said that this is "a common eastern North American species, here recognizable by its slightly silky sheen (as the specific epithet suggests) and rounded rear margin of the head." In the references I read on the web, these ants are also slave holders. I only just learned about slave ants this past summer from Summer World: A Season of Bounty. Summer is coming. I urge you to click the link and buy the book in preparation for this coming summer. It is a valuable guide to the forests and meadows of New England.

I found an ant blog today at http://www.antweb.org/antblog. Go check it out and see if you want to subscribe to the RSS feed like I did.

Ants Set

_/\_/\_

Gray Squirrel

Sciurus carolinensis

When clicked, this photo will open, full size, in a new window.

Technorati tags: gray+squirrel Sciurus+carolinensis
_/\_/\_

Today I learned how to make a vignette of my photo of johnny-jump-ups from this summer. I used GIMP, QuickMask on GIMP, the wave distortion and the Gaussian blur. After I inverted the selection, I used the background color that I picked out of the photo to fill the selection.

When clicked, this photo will open, full size, in a new window.

Technorati tags: GIMP johnny-jump-up
_/\_/\_