Denmark - Part 2 - Garden Macro Photography

What a difference 6 month makes :-) The picture above is from our usual walk around Balling - take a look here to see how all that greenness was white last winter when we did one of our danish winter bushwalks.

Nature truly puts on a show during the summer months back home in Denmark! Long sunny days and water galore keeps the plants happy and flowering, which attracts an incredible variety of insects, which again supply birds and other wildlife with a good protein source. The shortness of summer makes it feel like all that life is buzzing around at turbo speed - having to sort out all the tasks of an entire life in a matter of a few summer months.


Bird are wary back home, it is much harder getting good bird photos in DK than down here in Australia. Birds will take off early when you try to sneak in on them and deep dark thick foliage makes it nearly impossible to pick birds hiding in trees and bushes. However, lots of other stuff is happening just outside the door, so armed with my macro lens I used quite a few hours in the garden.


Bumblebees, hornets and insects with half body-length tails - Good stuff! :-) The long tailed insect is a female Pimplinae indet. and I can reveal that the "tail" is not used for stinging! Indeed it is an elongated ovipositor used by the female to lay its egg in hard to reach places. I must admit that I never really used the time to intensely study and learn to name all the small stuff that lived around me when I grew up in DK, but boy it is truly a magnificent world to look into - I finally see the idea in having a garden .. and a macro lens to look at it through ;-)


Apart from fulfilling your wildest dreams as a macro "studio" a Danish summer garden also doubles as an excellent location for your food consumption needs. Danes are very good at maximizing the time outside in the daylight during summer, it is like fueling the body with energy before the arrival of the darkness of winter. Only the transmission of (important?) sports events on the television can lure the Danish back into their dark burrows :-D