Most of my pictures and posts are wide views of ponds, houses, construction, etc. I think of these as the “macro views”. But the things on the land that I get the most enjoyment out of are oftentimes the small things that you have to look closely or you will miss them. Today I decided to upload a picture and video of a few of these.

This is all taken on my phone camera, which isn’t so good. And I’m not exactly a professional photographer. But just maybe it can give a small sense of all the little wildlife that grows naturally on this piece of land.

In most of these pictures, I am just amazed at how crystal clear the water is. This is a close-up of the Thai morning glory vine that grows everywhere we let it. It has a pale/purple flower (you can see one peaking out on the right side of frame), and the roots will grow into soil or water equally well. In this area, the water is probably about half a meter deep, and you can quite easily see the roots extending downward 20 or 30cm. Beyond that, it is just in shadow from all of the leaves.

Sorry, this is a terrible picture of a dragonfly against the washed sand in the pond sand filter area.
Update: here is a slightly better picture…

I’ll try to bring a real camera with me one of these days. But there are dragonflies everywhere. Dragonfly nymphs (baby dragonflies) eat the mosquito larvae and adult dragonflies eat adult mosquitoes, so seeing these guys around everywhere is a good sign. On the other hand, they don’t stop for my pictures, so this is the best I could get with a mobile phone camera. Sorry again. 🙁

This is a 40 second video of the washed gravel underwater with a few schools of tadpoles. I splash the water a bit at the end because the water is so clear and you can’t see that all of this is under about 10cm of water until you see the ripples.