SNIPPETS OF NATURE NEAR ZMINJ

More or less a month ago, on the 6th of October, I stopped by the side of the road, in the rural area about ten kilometers from the small inland town called Zminj. In today's post, I'm gonna show you some plants and insects I photographed on the small clearing surrounded by oaks, only about twenty meters from the road.

This is the Eurydema ornata, a bug from the Pentatomidae family. A shield bug, in other words.

The bug was resting on the fruits of the Ligustrum vulgare plant. In the following photograph ...

... you can take a look at the scenery.

I wasn't there early in the morning, noon was only an hour further on the timeline ...

... but in the shade of the trees, the small herbaceous plants were still covered with dew.

The dew can look pretty different on different surfaces. On the leaves of the Potentilla cinerea plant, for example ...

... the droplets appear along the edges in a very decorative, photogenic way.

You can see another bug in this shot. The name of the species is Stictopleurus abutilon, it belongs to the Rhopalidae family. Another bug of the same kind ...

... was resting lower on the same plant. Can't tell you what plant it was becouse I didn't bother to photograph an entire leaf, fruit, or flower back then in October. The macro details shown in these two shots look too generic for a successful identification.

In this photograph, I came close to the humid, colorful upper surface of a leaf fallen from one of the surrounding oak trees.

Fallen leaves were scattered along the edge of the clearing. Yesterday evening, while I was preparing the photographs for today's post, a friend of mine known as @denisdenis here on Hive, came to visit, and he found an interesting face in this photograph. In the following two shots ...

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... you can see him pointing at that cool little thing.

Here I cropped that detail and made it a main character of this picture. In the following photograph ...

... you can see @denisdenis again. Just like before, you can see him use his magic finger to point at the things on the screen. There are a few more or less implausible theories about who @denisdenis really is. I'll mention only two of them here. One says that it's an exiled extraterrestrial that can help mankind develop into something better. According to another theory, he is a cyborg sent from the future to destroy the world as we know it and prepare it for what's inevitably coming. Who knows. The fact is that @denisdenis has this weird finger that can shine like the finger of the fictional extraterrestrial from the famous Spielberg movie.

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Here you can see the dry remains of the Trifolium angustifolium plant.

On one of those dry inflorescences, I found an interesting larva.

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This is the larval stage of Pyrausta aurata, a moth from the Crambidae family.

On the top of another inflorescence of the same kind ...

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... a small plant recently started developing from a seed.

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The small green detail looked great on the top of the intricate dry structure of the Trifolium angustifolium inflorescence. I can't tell you what plant this young plant is. Another Trifolium angustifolium, maybe, although I don't think so. I mean, it might look plausible that one of the seeds somehow turned into a plant before getting in contact with the soil, but I have a strong sensation that this is a different species that came from a seed that fell from one of the surrounding plants. I don't know. That's all speculation. If someone knows better, I would gladly hear the real story behind this situation.

At the base of the inflorescence shown in this photograph ...

... I found an orange little detail that I also can't explain. Can't tell you what this thing is. It looks fairly cool, that's for sure.

Here you can see another small plant covered with dew. Trifolium cherleri is the scientific name of the species.

These are the dry remains of the Eryngium campestre plant. On one of its dry spiky leaves ...

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... I found this tiny sphere that is still a mystery to me.

In this last shot, you can see a friend that was there with me.

AND THAT'S IT. AS ALWAYS HERE ON HIVE, THE PHOTOGRAPHS ARE MY WORK.

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurydema_ornata
https://identify.plantnet.org/the-plant-list/species/Potentilla%20cinerea%20Chaix%20ex%20Vill./data
https://www.britishbugs.org.uk/heteroptera/Rhopalidae/s_abutilon.html
@denisdenis/posts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trifolium_angustifolium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mint_moth
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eryngium_campestre

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