Things I’ve Seen

When I first started trying to get photos of dragonflies it seemed like they just never sat still, but after a while I found that they do, and sometimes for quite a long time. This male twelve spotted skimmer stayed still for a while so I was able to get close enough for a useable shot. He gets his name from the 12 brown spots on his wings, but some people (and many books) count the white spots and call him the 10 spotted skimmer. Only mature males have these white spots. Females and immature males have the twelve brown wing spots but not the white spots.

I think this is another skimmer; the widow skimmer. Bothe males and females have the dark wing spots but only mature males have the white ones. Adult males also have the powdery blueish white color on their abdomen. The name skimmer comes from the way that they fly low over the water, but some are also called perchers. I’m always happy to see the perchers, the skimmers are a little too fast when they’re skimming.

I saw a dragonfly land one day but because of the distance, the bright sunlight, and my colorblindness it instantly disappeared among the cattail leaves. I thought I knew where it was though so I just shot blindly a few times, hoping the lens had caught sight of it. The above photo is the result, proving that yes, dumb luck plays a part in being a nature photographer. I’ve had a hard time identifying this one but I think it might be an eastern amber wing.

NOTE: Several blogging friends have said that this is a male calico pennant and after a little research I agree with them. Thank you all very much for the help, I appreciate it.

While I was watching the dragonflies I was also looking for flowering cattails. Out of many hundreds this was the only one that had flowered up to that point but it won’t be long before they all have flowers. Native Americans used the roots of cattails to make flour and also wove the leaves into matting. Cattails produce more edible starch per acre than potatoes, rice, taros or yams, and during World War II plans were being made to feed American soldiers with that starch in the form of cattail flour. Studies showed that an acre of cattails would produce an average of 6,475 pounds of flour per year, but thankfully the war ended before the flour making could begin.

It was a hot but very windy day when I found this viceroy butterfly clinging to a leaf for dear life. I must have stood there for 20 minutes waiting for it to open its wings and it did every time I looked away or fiddled with the camera’s controls, so I ended up with one blurry shot of it with its flaps down. This shot shows how the strong wind was curling the tops of  its wings toward the camera. I was surprised that it could hang on at all. Those legs are small, but very strong.

There wasn’t any wind when I saw this eastern tiger swallowtail drinking from a vetch blossom but it was tilted in an unusual way so I never did get a really good shot of it. Now that I look at the photo I see that I could have gotten down lower and shot up at it, but then I probably would have been shooting into the sun. It’s amazing how birds, animals and insects use sunlight to their advantage and will often position themselves so the sun is behind them, meaning it is shining directly in your eyes if you try to see them. Fighter jet pilots use the same strategy to blind the enemy.

Since I work outside all day every day I always carry a small pocket camera, because as anyone who spends time outside knows, you just never know what you might see. One day I saw this Luna moth in the grass. At first I thought it was dead but it was just crawling through the grass rather than flying and I don’t know enough about them to know if this is normal behavior or not. Luna moths are one of the largest moths in North America, sometimes having a wingspan of as much as 4 1/2 inches. They are beautiful, with a white body, pinkish legs, and pale lime green wings. In northern regions the moth lives for only 7 days and produces only one generation, while in the south they can live for as long as 11 weeks and produce three generations.

We have a small yellow buggy that we use to get around the 760 acres where I work and one day this beetle landed on it. I haven’t been able to identify it but I think it’s one of the longhorn beetles. They are also called wood worms because of the way that many of them bore into wood. Some, like the invasive Asian longhorn beetle, can do serious damage to forests.

Along the Ashuelot River Queen Anne’s lace buds were just beginning to unfurl themselves in the sunshine.

Porcupine sedge (Carex hystericina) blossomed a few feet upriver. You can just see the tiny, almost microscopic wisps of whitish flowers at the pointed ends of some of the upper spiky protrusions (perigynia.) This plant is also called bottlebrush sedge, for obvious reasons. It’s very common near water and waterfowl and some songbirds love its seeds.

The stones showing in the river tell the story of how dry it has been. You don’t usually see this many until August but the water level is low enough in this spot right now to walk across without getting your knees wet, and we’re still in June. I suppose I shouldn’t complain; we’ve seen some damaging floods in recent years.

What I think might be bluejoint reedgrass (Calamagrostis canadensis) sparkles and shimmers in the breeze along the edges of the forests.

The closer you get, the more interesting it becomes. It’s a beautiful tall grass with very large seed heads.

It’s only when you take a real close look that you discover why it sparkles and shimmers so. Yellow pollen bearing male (staminate) flowers hang down, waiting for the wind will carry their pollen to waiting feathery white female (pistillate) flowers. Usually the pollen bearing male flowers will bloom and release pollen before the female flowers appear. In that way the pollen of one plant reaches and fertilizes nearby plants and the grass avoids fertilizing itself.

Orchard grass (Dactylis glomerata) is another tall, beautiful grass that seems to be having an extended blooming period this year. I wish more people would take a look at grass flowers because they can be very beautiful. And they’re easy to see because they’re virtually everywhere, even in vacant city lots.

Orchard grass is especially good for baling and it and most of the other pasture grasses grown on local farms will end up in hay bales. The lack of rain is working in the farmer’s favor and the first cutting of hay has dried well, but if the dryness lasts much longer it will start to work against them.

The male flowers of eastern white pine trees (Pinus strobus) are called pollen cones because that’s what they produce. Pine trees are wind pollinated and great clouds of pollen make it look like the trees are burning and releasing yellow green smoke each spring. Virtually everything gets dusted with pollen; cars, buildings, and even entire lakes and ponds. If you live near pine trees it’s impossible not to breathe some of it in and if you leave your windows open you’ll be doing some house dusting in the near future. Pine pollen is a strong antioxidant and it has been used medicinally around the world for thousands of years. Its health benefits were first written of in China nearly 5000 years ago and they are said to be numerous.

When the white pine’s pollen cones have shed all of their pollen they fall from the trees in the many millions and cover the ground for a short time. Here they’re suspended in a spider’s web.

Here in this part of the country our corn is supposed to be knee high by the fourth of July but it looks like the dryness might keep it shin high instead. When I was a boy cornfields stretched to the south as far as I could see, growing on rich bottomland along the Ashuelot River, built up by annual spring flooding over thousands of years. This land has been farmed for at least as long as I’ve been alive.

You might find a conspicuous lack of fungi and slime molds here this year but again, that’s because it has been so dry.  I did see a bracket fungus that was a little sad but it still had a blush of pinkish orange on it. Since orange is such a hard color to find in nature I thought I’d show it here.

I think we are bound to, and by, nature. We may want to deny this connection and try to believe we control the external world, but every time there’s a snowstorm or drought, we know our fate is tied to the world around us.  ~Alice Hoffman

Thanks for coming by.