We’d popped into Calpe for a spot of lunch. Not wishing to eat large lunches, ours tend to be tapas, either calamares [squid] or chipirones/chopitos [baby squid – I think chopitos is the Valenciana name]. The astute reader may see something of a pattern. 😀 In Calpe it is almost invariably the latter.
To aid digestion, we went to see what might be happening around Las Salinas, the brackish lagoon behind the beach front and hotels. The familiar Flamingos were in residence but staying away from the edges. I couldn’t see any sign of Common Stilts this time so there was no bird life to play with.
Not very much was flying over the land, either, though there was a constant hum from bees, sounding a bit like a 50Hz mains hum, foraging in the flowers that abounded the scrub. Most obvious, in glaringly yellow swathes, were masses of Bermuda Buttercups (Oxalis pes-caprae). I don’t think I’ve come across a hyphenated binomial name before – curious. Straight-forward swathes weren’t really my scene but Francine, also playing with her new acquisition, was giving them her more artistic slant.
Such masses make it quite tricky to isolate individuals successfully for a more traditional wildlife photo but finally I did manage to catch a bee [no attempt at species identification], its face covered in pollen, in the middle of one of the flowers.
Lavender was another big floral presence around the lagoon. It was also acting like a magnet to the bees, as well as to Francine’s intentional camera movement fun and games. I am still playing with my new kit on a more basic level and sticking with the isolation approach. I tried isolating one lavender head against the blue sky first but ended up preferring a contrasting greenish background.
We came across one sizable patch of cactus, too, sporting a good crop of bright red prickly pears. Many of these plants have been struck by a disease of some description, which withers them very badly and turns them an unappealing grey. I’m not sure its terminal but it certainly isn’t photogenic. So it was nice to see a patch looking healthy and bearing fruit. These, from what I can make out, are a cactus of the Opuntia genus. I don’t think I’ll go any further than that. Since these were not flapping in the gentle breeze, I had another go at focus-stacking [so inevitably thought of this as a Stacktus].
That digested lunch.
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