In the summer, these guys create a ruckus whenever I walk along the roadside. Sometimes if I’m walking with the wind, they’ll jump up and flutter, momentarily hovering as the wind holds them in place. I’ve yet to capture a picture of one up in the air like this, but it’s fun to try. As a kid I used to play with these during summers at the cottage. This is one of my earlier sets, using a 1X-4X continuous zoom microscope.
Bonus grasshopper. I’m not sure which species it is. I found numerous plastic fibers wound around its legs. These are shown below. I’ll be making a page dedicated to this issue soon. It’s absolutely criminal how desperately we denied and rejected the reality of our plastic crisis, because now it’s a crisis beyond controlling. I think on some scales this is what we wanted – to be powerless to change it, without agency, so we wouldn’t have to change our behaviour.
