I’m forever finding feathers in strange places out there in the woods. In the past I’ve stumbled through the undergrowth to see what I thought was a beautiful solitary flower, only to find that it was instead a colorful feather. This one landed on a fern frond.
I stopped in to visit one of my favorite lichens recently. This poplar sunburst lichen (Xanthoria hasseana) always seems to be producing spores. The little round cups are its fruiting bodies (apothecia) and they have been there since the day I found this lichen-probably 3 years ago now. It’s a beautiful thing.
Dragonflies start life as an egg in the water. Once they hatch they live for a time as a water nymph until climbing out to shed their exoskeleton and begin life as a winged adult. The photo shows the shed dragon-hunter dragonfly nymph exoskeleton (exuvia) that clung to a rope while it was being shed. The rope it clung to was about half to three quarters of an inch in diameter, I’d guess. I can’t explain the blue “eyes” but they could just be a trick of the light. Dragon hunters are large dragonflies that live up to their name by hunting and eating other dragonflies. They also eat butterflies and other large insects.
I went to a place where hundreds of knapweeds grow to see if they were blooming. They were and they were covered with bees of all kinds. I think this must be a honeybee because of its bead like pollen baskets, but I could be wrong because I’m not a bee expert. In any event we can see the color of knapweed pollen.
I think this metallic green grasshopper thought that he was invisible because he let me take as many photos as I wanted. He was right out in the open so it’s a good thing for him that I wasn’t a hungry bird. I never knew that they were so pretty until I saw them in a photograph, even though I caught many as a boy. Photography has taught me a good lesson in how seeing with different eyes can sometimes change our viewpoint about things we once thought that we knew well.
I saw a nest of hundreds of tiny spider hatchlings in a curled leaf one day. I don’t know what variety of spider they will grow up to be, but watching them was fascinating. They seemed very busy but I couldn’t see that they were actually accomplishing anything.
One of these Japanese beetles wore a white dot. Such dots are the eggs of a tachinid fly, and once they hatch the larva will burrow into the beetle and eat it. The beetle will of course die and the fly larva will become adult flies and lay eggs on even more Japanese beetles. Nature finding a balance.
Our blueberries and black raspberries are starting to ripen. Many berry bushes grow in the sunshine along the edges of trails, and their ripening increases the chances of meeting up with a black bear. Heightened senses are required in the woods at this time of year.
Though it didn’t seem any bigger the “super moon” was certainly colorful on the night of July 12th.
A Native American myth says that the sun and moon are a chieftain and his wife and that the stars are their children. The sun loves to catch and eat his children, so they flee from the sky whenever he appears. The moon plays happily with the stars while the sun is sleeping but each month, she turns her face to one side and darkens it (as the moon wanes) to mourn the children that the sun succeeded in catching.
These hook shaped mushrooms seem to be defying all of the mushroom guides that I have. I’ve never seen any others like them and haven’t been able to identify them.
In every stand of cattails there seems to be at least one leaf that dares to be different.
This skelotinized oak leaf taught me that there is a caterpillar called the oak-ribbed skeletonizer (Bucculatrix albertiella). It lives on the undersides of leaves and eats the soft tissue, leaving just the veins behind. The tiny blue insect in the photo isn’t the culprit but it’s so small that, even by zooming in on the photo, I can’t tell what it is.
When the seeds of curly dock are forming they look like tiny tear drop shaped pearls that shine in the sun. They are beautiful little things that always deserve a second look.
Was does a tendril do when it can’t find anything to curl around? It curls anyway. This might not seem earth shaking unless you know that a tendril curls in response to touch. Through a process called Thigmotropism, the side away from the point of contact grows faster than the side that makes contact, and that is why it coils around any object that it touches. So why and how does it curl when it hasn’t made contact with anything?
Timothy grass (Phleum pretense) gets its common name by way of Timothy Hanson, a farmer who began to cultivate it in 1720, a few years after its introduction into colonial America in 1711. It’s an important hay crop and is also quite beautiful when it blossoms.
The earth is rude, silent, incomprehensible at first; be not discouraged – keep on – there are divine things, well envelop’d; I swear to you there are divine things more beautiful than words can tell. ~Walt Whitman
Thanks for stopping in.
New Hampshire Garden Solutions 