Throwback Thursday travels back to Hatherton, Cheshire in the late 1980s.
A pair of Common Frogs mating in a garden pond one spring evening. This should have been the start of my Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Future post but I skipped a few photos to stop the post getting too long.
This is my contribution to the Weekly Prompts: Leap challenge.
Two Common Frogs ready to leap at any insects that check out the Thyme flowers.
A Black-capped Chickadee leaping into flight.
This is my contribution to the Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Future.
The prompt got me thinking about some of the natural history subjects I have photographed over the years. Butterfly eggs that will hatch into caterpillars that in the future will pupate and emerge as a butterfly for example.
After coming up with quite a few different life cycles I remembered my photos of the various stages in the development of a Common Frog (Rana temporaria). Some of them were published in a school textbook to illustrate the life cycle.
Multiple clumps of Common Frog spawn forms a large mass in a garden pond in Cheshire, England.
After a while the eggs in the spawn hatch into tiny tadpoles a few millimetres long. Here, three tadpoles are clustered together on an egg.
Over the following weeks the tadpoles grow enormously, this individual is now around 30 millimetres long. It won’t be long before this tadpole starts to develop legs.
After a while the tadpoles develop legs, their tails shrink and they emerge from the water as tiny froglets.
An adult Common Frog at the side of the garden pond where I photographed the frog spawn and this story started.
I skipped a few photos in an attempt to keep the post short.
This is my contribution to Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge: Items with two M’s.
I was considering two photos for the challenge and rather than pick one decided to go with both. So I suppose that’s 4 M’s, or 6 if you count the two M’s in monochrome.
This is my contribution to the Tuesday Photo Challenge – Common.
My first thought was of the various species of flora and fauna with Common in their common English names.
A female Common Merganser with young on Lake Huron, Ontario, Canada.
A Common Frog in a garden pond in Cheshire, England.
A pair of Common Tern mating on a boulder in Lake Huron, Ontario, Canada.
A male Common Kingfisher photographed in Cheshire, England.
This is my contribution to Cee’s Black and White Photo Challenge: Candid Photography (human or animal).
I had a few human photo ideas for the challenge before thinking of some of the photos of Common Frogs taken in Cheshire in the 1980s. They got so used to me being around the garden pond that they would ignore me.
This is my contribution to the Cosmic Photo Challenge: Up close and personal.
I had a few ideas for the challenge and had decided on one until I started selecting photos. After picking the first shot I was planning on using I went in a different direction.
Here are three up close and personal shots of nature subjects taken in Cheshire, England in the 1980s. In one of those strange coincidences, after picking them I realised that they all had Common in their common English names.
First, a bird. A portrait of a male Common Blackbird. I had been photographing a plant species in a ditch when this male decided to check out what the human was up to. As I’m in a ditch the bird is looking down at me.
Second, an insect. A portrait of a Common Quaker Moth taken with a high magnification macro lens.
Third, an amphibian. A close up of a Common Frog in a garden pond in Cheshire, England. Most of the frogs eye is below the surface of the water. Taken with a high magnification macro lens and possibly one of the occasions when the camera body and/or lens ended up being dipped in the water.
