End of Summer Beauty

Due to all the rain we’ve had I think, we have an abundance of fruits, seeds and nuts this year. Silky dogwood berries like those in the above photo are everywhere this year. Heavy clusters of them weigh down the branches and their varying shades of blue and white as they ripen always remind me of Chinese porcelain.

Elderberry bushes are also heavy with ripe fruit but it won’t last long because these are a real treat for birds. I was surprised that I was able to get a shot of this bunch before they were eaten. I grew up across the street from an Italian lady who used to tell me of all the benefits of eating and drinking anything elderberry. She’s the one who got me thinking about the health benefits of certain plants. Elderberry bushes grew by the hundreds all along the river and when she was younger she said, she would gather as many as she could and make elderberry wine and other things from them. I just saw a small bottle of elderberry syrup selling for $19.99.

NOTE: Raw elderberries and their juice is toxic so they should always be cooked or processed before use.

Virginia creeper berries are another favorite of birds, especially songbirds. It is said that deer, gamebirds, and small critters also eat them. Before she died my mother planted Virginia creeper on wire that was attached to the porch on our house, so I grew up with a view much the same as the one seen here. When the leaves turn bright red in the fall and there are still plenty of blue berries left it’s beautiful.

All the ripe fruit got me thinking about the birds that would eat it all so I went to see how the cedar waxwings were doing. It looked to me like they were still eating mostly insects but I did see a couple of them high up in a cherry tree eating cherries, so it’s just about that time. A flock of them can strip a crabapple tree of apples in no time at all, so all the wild fruit growing along the river should go fast.

This is the rock in the river that many of the cedar waxwings call home base when they’re feeding on insects. They blast off from here and go swooping and twirling through the air with some amazing acrobatics before coming back to rest on the stone. They’re really amazing to watch so once I get here sundown is often the only reason I leave.

I’m seeing a lot of native wild grapes dangling from the trees this year as well. They’re usually frost or river grapes but these were quite big so I think they’re probably Concord grapes. I wondered what bird could open its mouth wide enough to get one of these in so I looked up which birds ate grapes and the list is long. It includes cedar waxwings and Baltimore orioles. Of course there are many grapes smaller than these and I’m sure they would be the first choice.

I can imagine birds pecking at grapes. Or if it wasn’t a bird it must have been something else that made juice drip out of the grapes dangling above this grape leaf. I watched a yellow jacket licking up the grape juice and moved in closer for this shot. And then I was surrounded by flying yellow jackets, so there must have been a nest in the tree above. In dry years they’ll nest in the ground but when it’s rainy like it has been this year they’ll nest above ground. I was thankful that they let me escape un-stung. I mowed over a nest in the ground once and was stung many times. And I had shorts on. You don’t forget that.

One very foggy morning I found myself out in the wetlands again. It was so foggy I couldn’t get any long landscape shots but the mist revealed that the trees were draped full of spider webs like the one above. I thought that all that water on its web must bother the spider but I’m sure like all of nature they are patient and would just wait for the sun to dry things out. I walked on, wondering what else I’d see.

Slowly the sun was burning its way through the mist. I stopped at a small roadside pond and saw turtles out of the water. It looked like one of these turtles was getting impatient and pushing the one in front of it up the log. The scene showed me that the sun was gaining strength quickly now as I thought it would, and strong sunlight often means insect activity.

I went to a spot where I knew some beautiful red meadowhawk dragonflies hunted. I had seen them and had even gotten a couple of not so good photos of them the previous week but red is very hard for me to see, so they usually just blended into the vegetation and disappeared. On this day I walked into the bushes where I had seen them before and just waited. Meadowhawks like to hunt in vegetation so they sit and watch the grasses rather than the water like some other dragonflies. When I walked into the area I scared up lots of insects out of the grass so I thought the dragonflies would be around. I was right; before long the one in the above photo came along and landed on a deer tongue grass leaf in front of me, and I finally got the shot I wanted. It’s a beautiful creature.

While I was taking shots of the meadowhawk I felt a tap on my midsection but paid it no real mind. Finally, I looked down and saw this face looking up at me. A large dragonfly had landed on me and was giving me a hug. So what to do now? In my left hand was the Canon camera I had used on the meadowhawks but it was useless up close like this and if I let it dangle from its strap it would scare away my visitor, so with my right hand I slowly reached over the dragonfly and into my shirt pocket for the little Olympus I use for close shots. I was able to turn it on and take off the lens cap without disturbing the dragonfly, and I took this shot. If you click on the photo and zoom in on its face, you will see what looks remarkably like an abstract representation of a human face.

With my right hand I held the camera out to my side and, shooting without being able to see this view of the dragonfly, I took several shots. Not surprisingly most of them were terrible; this is the only one worth showing to you. Then I thought that maybe if I tried my cell phone camera I’d have better luck so I reached into my back pocket for it. When my visitor saw the phone it immediately flew off, so that was the end of this encounter. I’ve had dragonflies land on me before and once, when one landed on my shoulder, I put my finger up to it and it climbed on and perched there like a canary. In fact, I had quite a time getting it to let go. Luckily a coworker came over and helped. This dragonfly, if I’ve done my homework correctly, is called a green striped darner. It seemed huge at about 3 inches long; twice as big as the meadowhawk. Its wingspan is said to be about 4 inches, so everything about it just seems really big. It is one of the “mosaic” darners and you can see where that name comes from if you study its beautiful body. It is native to the northeastern U.S. and I’ve read that they “may be found resting on tree trunks or hanging from branches.” And on people too, apparently.

I could see that this was going to be one of those days when one thing happened right after another. Out of the corner of my eye when I was getting photos of the friendly dragonfly I saw a great blue heron glide by, flying low as if to land, and here it was. I wondered if it was waiting in line to have its photo taken but no, it was just fishing. All the plants you see below it, which are smartweeds, are growing right at the edge of a stream, and that’s where the big bird was fishing. It waded around paying no attention to me so I took a few shots and wished it good luck as I left.

I had walked just a few yards when another red meadowhawk landed in the gravel at the side of the road. I should say that “red meadowhawk” isn’t this dragonfly’s official name. I thought it was an autumn meadowhawk at first but that one has yellow legs so I tried to look up what its real name was and found that there are so many species of red dragonfly even experts have trouble identifying them, so for now I’m staying with red meadowhawk. You can see how this beautiful dragonfly holds its little “hands” together in front of itself. If you scroll back to the first one I showed you’ll see the same pose. They look as if they’re clapping to a beat only they can hear.

It seems to me that these gentle, intelligent creatures are as curious about us as we are about them, so I’ve learned to walk into a spot where they’re active and then to just stand or sit still. They’ll hover in front of you and fly by for a bit, and when they’ve decided that you aren’t a threat, they’ll feel comfortable enough to land very near. Let them study you first and then they’ll usually let you study them.

Beautiful little forked blue curls, an end of summer wildflower, grew alongside the road. Barely as high as your shoe tops, they make up for their small size by blooming prolifically. These plants are annuals that grow new from seed each year. They seem to like sandy soil and I find them growing along river banks and sometimes roadsides, and sometimes in my own yard.

The insect is guided by the spotted lower lip of the flower and if it is heavy enough the arched anthers spring down and dust it with pollen. Their pollen is white, as can be seen at the ends of the anthers in this shot. Each pollen grain looks to be about the size of a salt crystal.

New York asters have started blooming. These flowers are smaller than those of their cousins the New England asters but are still quite showy.

New England asters are about 2-2.5 inches in diameter and the New York asters are about 1 to 1.5 inches. My favorite New England aster, the dark purples like the one seen here, are just coming into full bloom.

Little bluestem grass has gone to seed and its light catching seed clusters can be seen everywhere right now. The way the light falls on its seed clusters and its pink / bronze stems is very beautiful. In fact people love it enough to plant it in their gardens and several cultivars have been developed. In the Native American Lakota tribe their word for little bluestem meant “small red grass.”

Here is a light catching cluster of seeds, which are valuable food for songbirds, game birds, and many small mammals. We have little bluestem growing along our roadsides and sometimes when the sun hits them just right, it looks as if you’re driving between two ribbons of pure light.

Turkeys are one of the birds that love little bluestem seeds and I’ve wondered if the grass evolved its light catching ability to make it easier for birds and animals to see them. This bird and a few others were just off the roadside in a beautiful field of light one day. When I pointed the long barrel of the zoom lens at them they must have thought I was a hunter because they all immediately crouched their heads down and walked quickly away, still in a crouch. Wild turkeys will chase people; that’s something that has been documented many times, so I thought they’d be fine with my being there, but they weren’t. I left feeling sorry to have disturbed them. We should be very grateful that these gentle birds are here, because they eat a lot of ticks.

I was going to sit on a park bench at a local park but it was already taken by this red eyed blowfly, so I moved on.

This cabbage white butterfly took me for a ride into the Twilight Zone for a time. Every time I looked at it through the camera it had this black spot on its wing as is seen here but when I went back and looked at the photo I had taken there was no black spot. Are there two butterflies here? I wondered but no, there was just this one. I finally realized that it could move its hind wing and cover the black spot, and it just so happened that it did that every time I clicked the shutter. Finally when the black spot appeared and I was in sync, I got the shot, but I never knew they could do this.

Here’s the cabbage white with its black spot covered. Clever little rascal.

I had the thought that there had been a noticeable lack of flowers in these posts lately so this post would be about flowers, but nature had other ideas. This post is an example of what I mean when I say that sometimes it seems as if nature “throws itself at you.” All of the sudden there are photos waiting to be taken everywhere you go, and you begin to see things you’ve never seen before. It always seems a shame to pass up such opportunities so you just let nature lead you from one amazing and beautiful thing to another until you realize that you have just been along for the ride while nature has been doing the driving. It’s wonderful when it happens and it is one of the reasons I keep doing this. But you are also part of this and I hope you don’t mind the lack of flowers. There will be more along soon.

Beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love. ~Rabindranath Tagore

Thanks for coming by.

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Drying Out

Here’s where all the rain we had went. The Ashuelot River roared mightily as it went rushing by on its way to the Atlantic, carrying countless tons of soil with it. In flood the river deposits fine silt it over all the land that is flooded and then, sometimes many years later, rains wash it back into the river. It’s all a circle.

One of the flowers that like growing in the soil deposited by the river is the monkey flower, and I’ve seen more of them this year than I ever have. I haven’t seen a monkey in one though.

It is said that whoever named the monkey flower saw a monkey’s face in it, but I don’t see a monkey any more than I see a turtle in a turtlehead flower. Maybe its just lack of imagination on my part, I don’t know.

Here is where I found a monkey; in the face of a blue dasher dragonfly.

Because they kept landing in the shade I had to try many times over several days to get a shot of what I think might be an emerald damselfly. It’s the only useable shot I’ve gotten of one. I like its big blue bug eyes and its green metallic shine. This one, if I’ve identified it correctly, is a male and its abdomen and tail are powder blue, though they look white in this shot. The “tree” it is hanging on to is really just a twig, smaller in diameter than a pencil. This long bodied damselfly reminded me of the old wives’ tales about it and others of its kind that I heard as a boy. They were called “sewing needles” or “devil’s darning needles,” and were supposed to be able to sew your eyes and lips closed if you weren’t careful. Why would anyone tell a child such foolishness? I can’t see that doing so would serve any useful purpose. It would only make them afraid of a beautiful part of nature, and of what possible use is that? I can’t remember ever believing any such stories but memory can’t always be trusted, so I may have.

According to what I’ve read flies like hoverflies, or blowflies like the one seen in this photo, visit flowers to sip their nectar and taste their pollen. Flies sip the nectar for strength, which they need to keep flying, and the pollen helps them produce healthy eggs. Since they are hairy, bottle or blowflies help with pollination by carrying pollen from one flower to another. I walked though a field of Queen Anne’s lace flowers one day and saw as many flies as I did bees.

Some of the dogwoods are whispering things I’d rather not hear, so I didn’t listen. I just admired their beautiful colors.

A few posts ago I talked about the legume family and how you could identify them by the flowers, which have a standard and a keel. Here, on showy tick trefoil flowers you can see the vertical, half round standard and the keel, which juts out at about 90 degrees or so from the standard. Inside the keel are the reproductive parts. When ready the keel opens and lowers, and the reproductive parts show themselves as they’ve done here. Strong, smart insects like bumblebees will often force open the keel to get to the goodies ahead of time.

Every time I see a bicolor hedge bindweed blossom I remember when I had to search high and low to find one, because 99% of them were plain white. Now it’s just the opposite; all I see are bicolor ones and I have to search for the plain white ones. It’s an interesting lesson on how flowers evolve to attract more insects. More insects mean more pollinated flowers and that means more seeds. More seeds increase the likelihood of the continuation of the species, and continuation of the species is a driving force in nature.

One evening this cottontail saw me and crouched down to make itself small, as if it wanted to melt into the earth, but as I stood and watched it relaxed and made itself “big” again. I like it when animals sense that I mean them no harm, as this rabbit did. After taking a couple of shots I thanked it and left as it went on munching white clover. I could have artificially lightened this shot but I wanted you to see what I saw. I liked all the lights in the grasses.

Eastern amber wing dragonflies are very pretty but also quite small; I’ve read that they are only about an inch long. I saw them swarming around a pickerel weed plant at a pond and noticed that they never seemed to land. They were always in motion, so I gave up trying to get a shot. Then one day when I wasn’t near water the one shown above flew in front of me and landed on this grass stalk. As you spend more time with nature you find yourself becoming increasingly thankful for what once seemed small or insignificant things, like a dragonfly or a rabbit willing to pose for a photo. Gratitude tends to seep in quite naturally, as do love and joy.

A bee foraging on pollen had its pollen sacs filled to almost overflowing, by the looks. Knapweed pollen is white, as we can see. It’s a beautiful but supposedly invasive flower. I say supposedly because in this area it stays mostly on the embankments the highway department planted it on. I do see it in the wild occasionally but usually just a plant or two.

I’ve always liked the buds on Joe Pye weed as much as the flowers but of course the butterflies and bees prefer the flowers. Last year I found a colony of several plants that were covered in monarch and great spangled fritillary butterflies. I hope I see the same this year, because I still haven’t seen a monarch.

One day I found a little orange skipper butterfly probing for nutrients in the gravel along the side of a road. I got home intending to try to identify it and found so many species of little orange skippers it seemed like it would take forever to identify it, so little orange skipper will have to do for a name.

Pretty little pale spike lobelias have started blooming. Though their color can range from white to deep blue, most I’ve seen this year have looked like the one in the photo. This plant reaches to about knee high and grows in what can be large colonies. Each single flower could hide behind a standard aspirin. Next will come their cousins, Indian tobacco lobelia.

I don’t know who Barbara was but this plant is called Barbara’s buttons. It’s a native perennial plant (Marshallia) in the aster family. The flowers ae quite pretty and unusual, and probably about the same diameter as a large hen’s egg. I’ve read that it grows on roadsides, bogs, or open pine woodlands but it is said to be rare, even in its native southeastern U.S. It can be found for sale at nurseries specializing in rare, unusual and / or exotic plants. I first found this one last year in a garden at a commercial business building.

Like most other plants flowering raspberry is blooming well this year. I’ve known them for a very long time so they seem like old friends. I always like to see their cheery blooms, but even though their fruit looks like a giant, end of your thumb size raspberry, they seem tasteless to me. People have said that you have to put them on the very tip of your tongue to taste them but I’ve tried that as well, and all I’ve tasted is nothing. It was as if I was trying to taste air.

Invasive Japanese honeysuckle berries go from green to this electric, neon orange, and then to bright red, and the birds love them. That’s why I say once the genie is out of the bottle it’s near impossible to get it back in. True, you’d need an army devoted to nothing but honeysuckle control, but why not organize one?

It appears to be a great year for hazelnuts but in some places the blueberry crop has failed. In other areas like hilltops and mountainsides they’re doing fine. I met someone just the other day who told me the apple crop has also failed in certain orchards because of the late freeze, and he said his hay crop will only bear a single late cutting this year. You can’t cut hay in the rain.

I found this plant growing in the garden of a local business and realized that I didn’t know its name. The flowers looked like small hollyhock or rose of Sharon blossoms, but only half the size. The scalloped, basal leaves were shiny and stem leaves were narrow, like willow leaves. The plant was about 3 feet tall and loaded with flowers. I took a couple of shots of it and Google lens told me it was a false mallow.

With flowers like these I was sure it had to be in the mallow family because it had “that look” but false mallow was one I had never heard of.  After a little reading I found that it doesn’t like real hot weather and goes dormant until it gets cooler unless it gets regular watering, so I think I’d try it first where it got mostly cooler morning sun, even though some instructions say full sun. It blooms in mid to late summer and is drought tolerant and deer resistant, which would make it valuable in this area. If you like hollyhocks but don’t have the room this one might be for you; another name for it is “miniature hollyhock.”

I found a peachy daylily in my yard that I had forgotten I had. That’s the beauty of daylilies; you can fuss with them if you like but they are in fact a “plant it and forget it” perennial. If you’re looking for a low maintenance garden, daylilies should be near the top of your list. With early, midseason, and late varieties that come in just about any color but blue or black, you can do a lot with them.

Beautiful swamp milkweed is still blooming. One of the benefits of the overcast skies and rain has been longer blooming times for many plants. Some I’ve seen have been blooming for close to a month, and that’s unusual.

I was crawling around on the forest floor, getting shots of mushrooms when I noticed something blue in the cleft of a large boulder. Prying it out with my finger wasn’t easy but I got it out and saw that it was a painted stone. There in the woods it looked like a waterfall falling over the edge of the stone. Whoever painted it has some artistic ability; I thought it was nice how they got the feel of falling water with their brush. Now though, when I see it in a photo, it looks like snowy mountain peaks and trails, trees, and sky. Unless someone was on their hands and knees as I was they would never have seen it, so I wonder what the point of hiding it there was. In any event it I enjoyed seeing it, so I owe a thank you to whoever put it there.

If you want a photographic challenge try enchanter’s nightshade. Not only are the flowers smaller than a pea, but the plants usually grow in deep shade. I’ve had years when I just couldn’t pull it off even after trying many times, but this year after maybe a dozen tries I got lucky. Enchanter’s nightshade isn’t a nightshade at all, but is related to evening primroses. Its small round seed pods readily stick to your clothes and I sometimes find that I’m covered with them when I get home.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Circe the enchantress drugged Odysseus’ crew and turned them into swine. Circe, who was the daughter of the sun and granddaughter of the oceans, gives enchanter’s nightshade its scientific name Circaea.

As children, we are very sensitive to nature’s beauty, finding miracles and interesting things everywhere. As we grow up, we tend to forget how beautiful and magnificent the world is. There is magic and wonder for eyes who know how to look with curiosity and love. ~ Ansel Adams

Thanks for stopping in.

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