Clay Bank Tiger Beetle
This excellent tiger beetle landed practically in front of me on the road while I was heading home on August 31, 2025. So I grabbed my insect-catching jar out of my haversack, and plunked it down over it before it could take off again.
I did have to refrigerate it a bit before I could get pictures. This only slowed it down from “blindingly fast” to “kind of quick”, so I mainly just took pictures as fast as I could and hoped for the best[1].
This is the Common Claybank Tiger Beetle, Cicindela limbalis. I have actually had a picture of one of these before, way back in 2007, but that one was pretty beaten up and didn’t look anywhere near as nice as this one. Oddly, back in 2007 I put the common name down as the “Green-Margined Tiger Beetle”, not the “Common Claybank Tiger Beetle”. It looks like that is an alternate name, and apparently was the one that BugGuide preferred 18 years ago, but for some reason they switched it around in the meantime.
It was a bit bigger than the frame for my camera, and the legs kept getting cut off in the pictures, so here are the legs:
And, here are closer looks at the marvelous predatory jaws and the enormous compound eyes, which make it clear that this is a sight-hunting insect.
So it looks like I’m on a roll with the tiger beetles these days, it has only been a year since I caught the previous one. There are a bunch of different species, and I think at least a couple more live around here, so let’s see what turns up. In general, they all have a pretty similar shape, differing mainly in coloring. I think it is mainly because they live in different places, and so need different camouflage. For example, this one was actually pretty hard to see on the asphalt road, and the previous one blended in pretty well with short grass.
[1] Taking pictures was aided quite a bit by the fact that I just upgraded my camera again. I had been using a Canon 40D digital SLR, which at this point is a 16-year-old camera. But, over the summer, a friend (Hi, John!) told me that his SLR no longer suited his photography style, and offered to sell me his Canon 80D and all the gear that went with it for about the price that he would have gotten from KEH Camera Brokers[2]. The 80D is only an 8-year-old camera, has about twice the resolution of the 40D, and it turns out it also has a significantly faster cycle time so I can bang out multiple photos more easily than with the old camera. It did have an odd quirk, though. I am using the Canon MP-E macro lens, and to use it properly, I needed to set the camera to “aperture priority”, which means that I could fix the aperture and force it to adjust shutter speed and flash intensity to get the correct amount of light. This is necessary in macrophotography, because if you don’t the camera will insist on opening up the aperture to get enough light, and the depth-of-field goes all to pot.
So, anyway, I had the lens mounted, and set aperture priority, and started trying to take pictures. But, the camera was convinced that there was not enough light, and so used excessively slow shutter speeds (as in, 5 or 6 seconds) while giving me a very weak flash. So I messed with it a long time, downloaded the manual, pored through it, and finally found a little note in the troubleshooting section where it mentioned this problem. The fix for it was to go through several layers of the camera’s menus in the exposure control section, and click on what was basically a “Quit doing that!” button. So I clicked the button, and now it works fine. Go figure.
[2] I normally buy my gear from KEH, so this was just cutting out the middleman. If I had bought a camera from KEH right now, though, I probably would have gotten the 70D, because that’s the one that is currently in the “sweet spot” where the price just plummeted to around 20% of what it cost new. Getting the camera from John basically allowed me to get a one generation newer camera for about the same price.
He’s a nasty-looking character, isn’t he.
2007? Crazy to think we’ve been doing this blogging thing as long as that, eh?
Lovely photos as usual, my friend.
Yes, it is kind of startling when I think about it. It still seems like I just started on this recently, until I remember that my daughter, who was one-and-a-half when I started, just turned 20.