Our modest urban backyard in Lexington, Kentucky, is a surprisingly rich biotope for bugs (arthropods), surprising with respect to my own low expectations, and rich in the number of species, not individuals, that pass through. The total number of bugs has declined dramatically over the past two decades, here as much as everywhere else. Twenty years ago, when we opened the kitchen window for a few seconds at night, a dense cloud of moths and beetles would pour in. Today, it’s down to two or three mosquitoes. The following images describe the state of affairs in the early 2020's. The bugs are from within a fifty-foot radius around the kitchen, all photographed alive and unsedated. I started the project during the first Covid summer. In the short time since then, the bug numbers seem to have plummeted even faster than before.
Some technical notes on macro photography are here.
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