The 27th of September was a nice, warm, and mostly sunny day with just a bit of rain that fell late in the morning. I watched the rain through my window while working on the photographs to use in future posts, that were future back then but are probably already published now, and then, in the early afternoon, I went walking around the area between the village of Liznjan and the sea, four or five kilometers from where I live.
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In today's post, you'll see the cows, flowers, and insects that I encountered and photographed on that occasion.
Here you can see a small moth ...
... that was resting on one of the branches ...
... of the Odontites luteus plant.
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These three shots were taken through the macro lens so you can now take a better look at the yellow flowers. Especially if you enlarge the picture by clicking on it.
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When it comes to the moth, I can't tell you the name of the species, but I'm pretty sure that the family is Tortricidae.
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About a hundred or two hundred meters from there ...
...the cows were grazing in line.
When I left the Odontites luteus plant, my attention got caught by a plant that I wasn't able to identify. It looks a bit like something from the genus Silene in the Caryophyllaceae family, but I haven't found a species that matches this photograph.
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Some lovely ladybugs were hanging on that fairly mysterious plant ...
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... and I spent some time following their everyday activities through the macro lens.
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Most of these photographs were taken with the flash of my camera on because it was easier that way to freeze the movement of the insect and show all the details of its anatomy, but here you can also see one shot that shows the scene in ambient light because that subtle natural light works much better for the aesthetics and atmosphere.
While the ladybeetles were chewing the juicy parts of the plant in front of my macro lens ...
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... the cows were grazing in the distance.
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A vegetarian ladybug is a fairly rare encounter because most beetles from the Coccinellidae are predators. Some of them occasionally supplement their carnivorous diet with pollen. Some species feed on mold-related fungi called mildew that form a powder-like growth on the surfaces of leaves. But very few Coccinellidae feed on the plant tissue, and all of them belong to the Epilachninae subfamily. So this is definitively an Epilachninae ladybug, but I'm not sure about the exact species.
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It looks a lot like the Henosepilachna argus but the size and the number of dots don't match what I found in the photographs present on the Internet. Maybe, like in quite a few other Coccinellidae, the size and number of the dots can vary. Or probably, this isn't the Henosepilachna argus but some other related vegetarian species.
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When I left the ladybugs and their host plant ...
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... the cows started walking towards me ...
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... so I was able to get some lovely portraits.
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The cows stopped in the middle of the meadow. They continued grazing there ...
... and I prepared the macro lens ...
... to explore and photograph these small flowers ...
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... of the Petrorhagia saxifraga plant.
Meanwhile, not all the cows were busy feeding ...
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... some of them were watching me.
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This bull looked slightly menacing.
The weather was mostly sunny, but from time to time the moving clouds were changing the intensity of sunlight for short periods. It was sunny when I took the above photograph, and then, a moment later ...
... a distant cloud brought a slight change to the scene.
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When I got out of the macro view, I noticed that the cows are moving again.
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Soon they were pretty close to me.
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I took this group portrait and then ...
... I heard some rustling in the vegetation not far from my feet. It was a lizard. The Podarcis siculus. A lizard from the Lacertidae family. In the intricate herbaceous vegetation, the small reptile wasn't visible, but then the lizard climbed a small pile of gardening & construction waste that an unknown kind soul has left by the side of the road, and I got a chance to take this fairly good photograph.
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The cows were still there, of course, so I took another cow-themed photograph.
A bit later, in the field across the road ...
... I saw a herd of goats.
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And that's it. I showed you all I photographed back then on the 27th of September 2022.
The following links will take you to the sites with more information about some of the plants and insects that you saw in the post. I found some stuff about them there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odontites_luteus
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/47155-Tortricidae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epilachninae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henosepilachna_argus
https://www.plantea.com.hr/stjenoviti-kamenicak/
AS ALWAYS HERE ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK.
