Lady beetle

Click for greater clarity.

And on some of the sunflowers in the prairie colony I visited two days ago I found several lady beetles, also known as ladybugs (though they aren’t true bugs) or ladybirds (which, though they can fly, surely aren’t birds). I took the picture at 1/500 of a second, but the beetle’s mouth parts were still moving quickly enough that they appear slightly blurred in the photograph (as you may be able to see in the larger view).

© 2011 Steven Schwartzman