Oryctes nasicornis

Digitally "enhanced" (*) - got huge problems with lighting macros. I´ll take part in a workshop next month where I´ll hopefully learn.
* : I use "Photo Impact" so I can´t use the synonyme "photoshopped".
Unfortunately, Photoshop seems to be unaffordable.

This is the first pic I ever submitted to Wikipedia.The german and english articles aren´t very good, the dutch one is much more detailed. In the european wikipedia (till today I din´t know how many different ones there were) there is a very brief article with almost no information but with the sentence "Dim, the beetle from the Disney and Pixar film, A Bug's Life is a European rhinoceros beetle." Aha. How interesting...
Gonna check the polish & spanish wiki now... :)

Oh, and in case you´re worried: I know these beetles are protected, but we found him in a completely artificial environment without any chance of survival, so I´thought it would be o.k. to use him as a model before releasing him in an appropriate spot. He spent some time in a box with lots of soil, where he dug himself in.

Ronja & Rhino beetle

Ronja, a colleagues cat who´s lodging here for two weeks. As with almost any animal and plant, I love the natural coloring best.

Male Rhinoceros beetle (Oryctes nasicornis) another colleague found at work in the soil for one of the planters today. They´re pretty and pretty rare.

“Why do you go away?

“Why do you go away? So that you can come back. So that you can see the place you came from with new eyes and extra colors. Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving.”
― Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky

I love Terry Pratchetts books.

spent a nice and sunny day in the Moormuseum, where I watched dragonflies and admired the vegetation

Mini-Emsflower

as soon as I got there the sun was gone :(

Bananarama

Got my first photo as a canvas today and like it :).
With 90 x 60 it´s a bit small, but was expensive enough...
I wanted a motif I wouldn´t get tired of too quickly, which was simple & meant something to me. And it had to be green, my favorite color.
So I chose a close-up of a banana leaf because I love the red-green contrast and I came along bananas on so many of my travels.
In Thailand I ate rice from banana leafs, in Ecuador I sat at the lagoon and fed bananas to the fish, in Costa Rica I discovered that fried bananas (platanos) could become my favorite dish ever... This photo was taken in Honduras.

"Green is the prime color of the world, and that from which its loveliness arises." -- Pedro Calderon de la Barca

"He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals." -- Oscar Wilde

Foxcubs

There is a fox den close to home and yesterday night I was lucky to watch all 4 cubs playing on the road right in front :).

3 days off...

1 day work...
2 days off...

Could get used to that! :)