SUMMER MORNING IN PALERA

The following photographs were taken long ago. Relatively. I mean, it feels like a long time ago to me. The year was 2015. On the 9th of August, reasonably early in the morning, I was rambling around the fields and meadows in the coastal area called Palera, situated a couple of kilometers from the village of Liznjan, and five or six kilometers from my hometown.

I visited this place many times before & since that warm summer morning in 2015, and I published quite a few posts about it. Still, every visit brings something new, or at least different, so I'm pretty sure that today's virtual tour around Palera will have an identity of its own. In this opening shot, you can take a look at the scenery. The blue sky and dry vegetation look very good together.

Here you can see a colorful caterpillar on the green, juicy Foeniculum vulgare plant. This is the larva of the Papilio machaon swallowtail.

I found this beetle from the Carabidae family somewhere along the way, in the shade of an isolated pine tree that grew near the sea.

Can't tell you the name of the species.

Most of the time, I was walking through the dried-out grass ...

... but at one point ...

... I ended up surrounded by flowers.

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This was a cabbage field some months earlier ...

... but now the Anthemis arvensis plant has taken over.

I don't remember how I felt back then, but I'm pretty sure that I had a great time in that field full of flowers.

Here you can see a spider with its prey.

Don't know what the prey is, but when it comes to the spider, I can tell you that this is the Zilla diodia, a species from the Araneidae family.

Here, on the top of my index finger, you can see a bug from the Scutelleridae family.

This is an Eurygaster maura.

A nymph. The bug shown in the last three photographs will go through some slight changes before becoming an adult insect. The Eurygaster maura, especially in its nymphal stage, feeds mostly on grasses.

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Here, especially if you enlarge the picture by clicking on it, you can see a small group of Mordella aculeata beetles.

In this photograph, a bee, probably from the Andrenidae family, is resting hidden among the seeds on the top of the grass.

This long-legged nymph of the Acrometopa macropoda bushcricket was resting
among the fluffy parachute seeds of the Tragopogon pratensis plant.

The Eupholidoptera schmidti bushcricket shown in this photograph, not only was resting on the seed-covered top of some type of grass but was also eating those seeds.

Here you can take a better, more up-close look at its cute face. 😆

This other bushcricket, the Ephippiger discoidalis ...

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... was eating the seeds of some dried-out plant that I wasn't able to identify. You can also admire another cute face 😀 in this photograph.

In this last shot, you can see the Opomyza petrei, a small fly from the Opomyzidae family. I couldn't get a better portrait of this fly because I didn't have any specialized macro equipment in 2015. I was rambling around the woods and meadows with just a small, half-broken camera back then. Many fascinating insects that I can magnify nowadays were too small for what I have at my disposal in 2015.

The following links will take you to the sites with more information about some of the protagonists of this post. I found some stuff about them there.
https://www.ukbutterflies.co.uk/species.php?species=machaon
https://www.kerbtier.de/cgi-bin/enFSearch.cgi?Fam=Carabidae
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthemis_arvensis
https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/486472-Zilla-diodia
https://www.britishbugs.org.uk/heteroptera/Scutellerideae/e_maura.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordella_aculeata
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrometopa_macropoda
http://www.pyrgus.de/Eupholidoptera_schmidti_en.html
http://orthoptera.speciesfile.org/Common/basic/Taxa.aspx?TaxonNameID=1132343
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opomyza_petrei

AND THAT'S ALL. THIS SUMMER WALK ENDS HERE. AS ALWAYS IN THE POSTS ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK - THE END.