Parks North of Pittsburgh

Managed to get some time to explore parks north of Pittsburgh. This area seemed to be only lightly explored by iNaturalist users so I got a bit carried away and ended up with 332 iNaturalist observations. While I haven't added it up, when all is said and done it should work out to at least fifty species I had never seen.

Right before the trip, I found a good deal for a Sony Macro Twin Flash. This made a big difference for taking photos of insects, although for plants the results were more mixed. The diffuser it comes with will need to be replaced since it still leaves lots of bright spots on reflective insects but other than that it seems to greatly improve images over the Sigma Ring Flash I was using before.

The lady beetle in the web particularly surprised me. Apparently that is not a lady beetle, but a handsome fungus beetle which tries to look like a lady beetle as a way to make predators believe it is poisonous.