BUDDLEJA BUDDIES - CRITTERS SUNDAY

No this isn't the nature reserve, garden or park, but a humble, Ramsey back alley. Amazing where you find photo opportunities. Hardly seen any butterflies or bees this year and now both appear on this beautiful bush. I call this bush a buddleja( pronounced buddleha) but I've noticed in America it's called a butterfly bush. I can see why. Butterflies to swamp them. What of it's strange name though?



Buddleja is actually a spelling mistake. The plant was named after the Reverend Adam Buddle who was a botanist and a rector in Essex, England. The botanic name has been the source of some confusion. By the usual practice of botanical Latin, the spelling of a genus name made from "Buddle" would be "Buddleia". However, Linnaeus wrote it down as "Buddleja", and never changed it, so by the rule of naming priority, "Buddleja" should be preferred, though the i/j interchange could be modernized as an orthographical variant.


Several species are popular garden plants, The species are commonly known as Butterfly Bush due to their attractiveness to butterflies; they are also attractive to bees, moths and ladybirds/ ladybugs. The species of buddleia with red flowers are also attractive to hummingbirds.


Some species are commonly found as escapees from the garden. B. davidii in particular is a great coloniser of dry open ground; in towns in Britain, it often self-sows on waste ground, where it grows into a dense thicket, and it is listed as an invasive species in many areas. It is frequently seen beside railway lines, on derelict factory sites and after the Second World War on urban bomb sites. This accounts for me finding this buddleja pictured down a stoney back alley. A garden escapee I like that.


For more wonderful camera critters see MISTY DAWN Camera critters and be sure to leave a nice comment for Misty' s own outstanding posts.

CRITTERS SUNDAY - DUCK CLOSE AND PERSONAL

Flamming June was a flamming cold, it was not Hotter than July and August has been just plain Awful. Welcome to the world of the Great British Summer! So only one type of critter I could post today to go along with all the rain, the one creature as they say it's nice weather for is a duck.

Now what duck this is I couldn't tell you. Anyone out there in Blogland know, throw the answer this way. Do you like his quiff? Along with his bright face his head feathers brushed back really drew me to him. I think he was all spruced for his this little duckette girlfriend, which is why I was able to snap him. Poor thing she never did turn up.

I wasn't a close to the duck as it looks. For this shot I had what's called a telescopic lens. Not as scary as it sounds. It's a longer fatter lens as opposed to the shorter slimmer wide angle or portrait lens. To get the blurred out of focus background, and the focus on the foreground in this case the duck it's dead simple. Just turn the zoom on full, and focus on whichever part of the image you want as the main subject, in this case the duck. The light was really poor so I had the ISO on 600 which is not ideal. The higher the ISO the less definition you get, but you can compensate with practise by honing in as sharp as you can on the focal point, your subject. Again it's a manual shot. Auto would have just bleached the white feathers into a block of colour due to the poor light, and the background would be too dark, not allowing the duck to pop out of the image.

So was that info of any use or was it as clear as mud? Just trying not get too technical, but impart the know how as simplistically as I can.

For more wonderful camera critters see MISTY DAWN Camera critters.