A closer crop of the same image.
This medium-sized fly (roughly the size of a housefly) seemed to be dedicating itself to hanging onto this flower -- no great surprise considering that the sun was going down and the wind was gusting around 40 mph at this spot. So it was quite tolerant of having a camera stuck in its face, and probably didn't object at all to having the flower stalk held so it didn't whip in the wind. At any rate, it was still there after all the pictures were shot.
I don't have a good ID on the fly. The flower is a "buckwheat", genus Eriogonum.
--Rik
Technical: Canon A710IS camera, 1/1250 second at f/4.5, focal length 5.8 mm. Auto-everything except exposure correction of -2/3 stop. Levels adjustment and additional background blur in post-processing. First image is roughly 80% of full frame on each axis. Second image is 80% of actual pixels.
