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Another New Hobby

By Robert Allen, BCLS (Life Member), CLS (Retired) T his past spring and summer I took up another hobby, as if I don’t have enough already. I had a few butterfly photos that I showed to a friend and he suggested I put them on a site called iNaturalist.org From butterflies I then branched out to dragonflies, damselflies, birds and animals. I posted them to my own site on iNaturalist.org. Trying to get these ‘things’ to sit still can be a challenge and some I had to use the burst feature on my camera and take a dozen or so photos and then choose the best one or two. Some of my photos are shown below but there are many more on: https://www.inaturalist.org/ observations/sir-vayor My camera is a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS50. I bought it in February 2018 and so far I have taken nearly 7,000 photos with it – again a lot of them were on burst mode so most of them have been deleted. The camera has numerous settings to allow all sorts of different modes for different types of photos and best of all, it easily fits in my pocket. Top Row: Left to Right: Eight-spotted Skimmer Blue Dasher Dragonfly Western Pondhawk Dragonfly Middle Row: Left to Right: Pine White near Sechelt California Tortoise Shell near Leavenworth, WA. Western White Admiral at the Whitehorse Airport Bottom Row: Left to Right: Mourning Cloak in Logan Lake Julia Orange Tip near Logan Lake Mourning Cloak in Sechelt

The mourning cloak butterflieshave different coloured wingtips. I don’t know if this is due to the different times of the year I took the photos or whether it’s because one is from southern British Columbia and the other is from the British Columbia interior.

As I was watching the eight-spotted skimmer it flew off the small twig and came quite close to me and caught a mosquito, went back to its roost and made a quick meal of it. Better for the mosquito to have been eaten than it to ‘eat’ me. ✥