Tuesday, October 07, 2008

Night critters

I've been meaning to use my ultraviolet light out in the desert for some time now. I didn't during the summer because it gets dark so late, and I'm usually falling asleep by 9. It's pretty dark by 7 now, though. I walked along a couple of trails looking for anything that fluoresced. I found a piece of plastic that glowed very brightly. A few steps later I found something else glowing just as brightly and started to pick it up. My hand was 3 or 4 inches away from it when I noticed that it had legs. I did not pick it up. It started running around and then it was easy to tell it was a scorpion. I took some flash pictures. I need to work on taking pictures at night


From Meridian_2008_10_07


I continued walking along and suddenly realized that I should have tried to get a picture of it using just the ultraviolet light. I headed back but couldn't find it. No problem. It wasn't very long before I found another one. This one was a lot smaller. I didn't have a tripod with me so I had to put the camera on my knee, and it wasn't steady enough for the 1 second exposure. Then the batteries in my ultraviolet light started going dead. The light clips on the bill of a cap, which leaves my hands free to mess with cameras or whatever. I needed to hold the quickly fading light closer to the scorpion. So I'm half laying on the ground with my face almost on the scorpion trying to get a picture. Yep, I'm taking the tripod next time.


From Meridian_2008_10_07

2 comments:

Lauren said...

ooOOooo you daredevil you... lol. is that a bark scorpion?

Unknown said...

The one I used the flash on looks to dark to be a bark scorpion. It was pretty big, too. I never saw the other one in normal light, so I don't know. Could have been.