The Goldenrod Buffet

Woohoo! My 100th deviation (and one scrap)! I've been stalling on putting this one together for a number of reasons, but when I realized I was so close to 100 pieces of art here, I figured I'd better make it happen!

A bit of background: Over the month of September, this glorious yellow goldenrod bloomed all over the semi-wild part of my school's gardens, and I spent a number of wonderful afternoons there with my camera, capturing the huge variety of insects (and other wildlife) that came to feast there. Many of these insects specialize in this one plant and only emerge in their adult forms during this one month. What I've shown here is pretty representative.

Clockwise from the top left, we have: locust borer (a type of longhorn beetle), some kind of wasp, an unknown moth, Pennsylvania leatherback (another longhorn beetle), honeybee, a different kind of wasp, another locust borer, milkweed bug, spur-throated grasshopper, and bumblebee. In the center, of course, is a monarch butterfly, definitely the most spectacular of the visitors to the Goldenrod Buffet.

I struggled with the composition of this thing for quite some time, finally deciding on ten small pictures to surround the butterfly. I was a little reluctant to use the locust borer twice (although I had so much trouble choosing just one of them that I'm kind of glad it worked out this way), but I just didn't have decent pictures of anybody else. (A lot of these bugs were moving FAST--they didn't care about my presence at all, but they just had to get to that next bit of pollen!) Also note that with the possible exception of the wasps and the milkweed bug, everybody here is a herbivore. I had hoped to get some of the predators as well, but the big wolf spider I saw didn't want to leave its shady spot on the underside of the plant and be photographed, and the ruby meadowhawk dragonflies never landed on the goldenrod.

Anyway, I'm extremely pleased with how this came out--I like doing these sorts of collages, but they take a lot more forethought than simply getting a photo ready to post, and so I don't do them nearly as often as I'd like. The last time was Violet Violets, almost two years ago.

Sorry for the big image, but I wanted to make sure the details in the little squares could be seen.