Stargazer Lilies

Several weeks ago the Stargazer lilies were at their peak and I was able to get the photos below. Be sure to click to enlarge.

 

I noticed a little insect that had found a safe spot to hang out right at

the center of the flower.

All in a Day

The last day of July was one of those perfect days with bright sun, a bit of a breeze, and best of all – it was a Saturday. I stayed close to home that day and was able to take lots of pictures in the garden. The garden was near its peak of summer flowering, and the butterflies and insects were quite active. Many of the red Admiral photos in the previous post were also taken on July 31st.

This summer started off much wetter than usual and that has led to an abundance of Japanese Beetles. They have been quite damaging to a number of plants, totally skeletonizing the leaves of their favorites. In the 17 years we have lived here, I do not recall seeing signs of more than the occasional Japanese beetle, but this year many of our ornamental plants are sporting holey, lacey foliage. Here is a mating pair on a hollyhock.

Bumblebees, honeybees, and other bees and flies love the purple coneflowers and the blackeyed susans. If we could have only one kind of flower in the garden, I would choose purple coneflower, not only for its beauty, but also for all the insects and birds it attracts.

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly -- This summer, the eastern part of the US is seeing record numbers of the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail Butterfly. Their range extends over the entire eastern half of the US and into parts of Mexico. We usually see a few of them in our garden every summer, but so far this summer I have seen only one of them, but this one is a real beauty! You can tell it is a female because the males do not have the blue and orange spots on the tail. Some females also have a dark form in which all of the yellow is black or dark grey.

Clouded Sulphur or Orange Sulphur – I can’t tell the difference between these 2 species and both are common across most of North America. There were so many around, that both species may have been present. I love their lime green eyes.

Hedriodiscus trivittatus Soldier Fly – I thought this soldier fly was really cool looking, especially from the perspective in the second photo. The larval stage is aquatic and the adults are usually found on flowers near the water. I wonder if this one came from our little garden pond?

Red Admirals

This has been a big year for Red Admirals around here.  The first ones I saw were very skittish and fluttered in jerks around the garden, rarely landing on anything for more than a second or two.  I was not able to get any photographs.  They seem to settle down with age and I was able to take these photos a couple of weeks ago on a walk along the Zumbro River and then also in our garden.  

They love the purple coneflowers and liatris.

Once they find a coneflower they like they will go from floret to floret like the big hand circling a clock face. I was able to get right up on the one in montage below as it made a complete circuit round the flower.  

This one was showing its age in its tattered wings and faded colors, but its appetite was undiminished!

High Summer in Minnesota and Georgia

I haven’t been very diligent about writing new posts this summer, but not for lack of interesting things to write about. We have had beautiful butterflies in our garden and nearby locations, along with interesting insects, lots of flowers, bird families, etc. I’ve taken loads of pictures here in Minnesota as well as some bird photos on my Mother’s front porch. It has been hard to find the time to write these blog posts because I have been outrageously busy at work and when I get home in the evenings all I want to do is eat some dinner (which means I have to cook it first), watch a little TV (I am a fan of “So You Think You Can Dance”), and go to bed. I really don’t want summer to slip away unnoticed and undocumented, so for the next couple of weeks I will make frequent short posts featuring some of the many photos I have taken.

I’ll start with some of the birds that were coming to the feeder on my Mother’s porch. She keeps sunflower seeds in it, and it really attracts the birds. Many of the birds continued to feed even when we were sitting on the porch only 15 or so feet away from the feeder. But they tended to dart to the feeder, grab a seed, and carry it elsewhere to eat. The young tufted titmice grew a little braver after we sat still for some time. They carried on in a camellia bush just next to the porch and used the porch rail as a staging area as they went back and forth to the feeder.

There was a very wary pair of house finches that showed up right after day break every day. It was difficult to photograph them, but I managed to get a couple of shots.

They didn’t mind sharing the feeder with black capped chickadees.

This little brownheaded nuthatch looked so small compared to the whitebreasted nuthatches we are used to seeing in Minnesota. It would cling to the brick column and hop down the rope suspending the birdfeeder.

We saw lots of Northern Cardinals. Cardinals are not comfortable feeding on hanging birdfeeders, but the sunflower seeds were too tempting for them to forego. They would try to perch on the feeder, but it was built for smaller birds, so they usually made a sort of “touch and go” landing as they grabbed a seed to take to the ground or a branch to eat. What they really liked most was to eat spilled seed from off the porch floor, but they would not come to the porch while we were sitting there. I was not able to get a photo of them at the feeders, but did manage to get a shot of a juvenile cardinal in a nearby shrub. I don’t know what that shrub is in the photo. I will have to ask my mother. ;-)

Other birds that we saw but that did not come to the feeder included, blue jays, blue birds, chimney swifts, and doves. One exciting wildlife spotting that I must mention was a red fox that my friend Nancy and I saw early one morning when we had gone for a walk. We saw it back in a wooded area that had a clearing through it for storm sewer drains. I think the fox was as shocked as we were. US red foxes are very secretive animals that are usually not seen near human habitation.

As I get to the end of this post it is obvious that I didn’t keep it very short. But I promise to have more short ones soon!

In Georgia

Hello from my hometown of Elberton, Georgia. I am visiting my mother this week. She is the only one of my family that still lives in the town where my father, who was career army, was last stationed. This was basically where my younger brother and I grew up and where my older sisters finished high school. Before moving here, my family lived on Okinawa, in Texas, and in Oklahoma. I consider Elberton my hometown since I lived here from ages 5 through 17, when I moved a whopping 35 miles away to go to college in Athens, Georgia.


Elberton bills itself as “The Granite Capital of the World”, which is only a bit of hyperbole. Elberton actually does produce more granite monuments (mostly tombstones) than any other place in the world, as you can see proudly proclaimed on the sign in the photo below.

That is not a cemetary in the photo above; it is a display of fine monuments that have been commitioned for future use in cemetaries or as examples of fine sculpting and engraving.

The Georgia Guidestones are the biggest granite display from Elberton. The Guidestones (click here to get to Wikipedia's entry) are Elberton’s answer to Stonehenge. ;-) This site  has a very detailed accounting of the history of the Guidestones with many photos and drawings. They are actually pretty cool, I think. Some folks got very upset about them, believing that they were satanic. Go figure.

It was too hot today to spend much time outside, but I did take a couple of photos around my mother’s house. Not too many plants in bloom in this heat, but I did find a pretty light pink Rose of Sharon.

And this scraggly climbing fern (for Bill in Louisiana).

And this pretty kalanchoe in bloom inside her house.

This is not the house I grew up in. She sold that house 10 years ago to rent this smaller house just down the street. It is almost adjacent to the elementary school my brother and I attended. Here is one of the famous Elberton granite monuments (non-tombstone) for the school. ;-)

I also found the pear tree that bore the juiciest pears way back when I went to this school. During recess in the autumn months, we school kids would pick the ripe pears from the branches that hung over onto the school playground. I can’t believe that it is still alive, much less that it is loaded with fruit that will ripen in months to come.

The pear tree outlasted the school. Maybe that monument is a tombstone afterall.  The school buildings and grounds are still present, but they are now a private residence.

I will close with a photo of my favorite tree. It is a big old oak on the playground of the school. During summers when I was a child, I would take whatever book I was reading and climb the tree to read in peace and quiet. I would need a ladder to get up that tree (or any tree!) these days …

Break-in!

Saturday morning we discovered that our house had been broken into during the night. The burglars had taken a screen down from one of the windows in the sunroom and climbed in through the open window. You can see the screen and open window in the photo below.

That’s the screen leaning against the ponytail palm and the window is open to the outside. Obviously the work of professionals because the screen remained undamaged, just dexterously and neatly removed from the window frame.

They knocked over the bird feeders that I bring in every night and seed spilled out onto the floor. I don’t know why that racket didn’t wake us up, but it didn’t. Nothing else was disturbed, not even the watering pitcher right next to the feeders.  Oddly, much of the seed seems to be missing ...

I had my suspicions as to who the perpetrators were and soon found evidence of their well-known sweet tooth -- the spilled hummingbird feeder on the ground just outside the open window.

And then, the smoking gun, or sticky paw prints, in this case; one the patio steps and others on the wall next to the window.

Very likely made by this individual caught on surveillance camera just days earlier while obviously casing the joint. 

 We'll be keeping our sunroom windows closed at night now ...

Belize Bird of the Week #10 – Blue-grey Tanager (Thraupis episcopus)

Tanagers are new world birds that are found mainly in the tropics. The 240 or so species of tanager are medium sized birds and many of them are quite colorful. Tanagers are in the family Thraupidae, which is in the midst of reorganization as scientists learn more about their genetics. In North America, the scarlet tanager is the most common, but the scarlet tanager is now thought to belong to the cardinal family.

The blue-grey tanager is fairly common throughout its large range from southern Mexico, through Central America and into the northern part of South America. They eat fruit, insects, and nectar. You can see it eating the cercropia fruit in one of the photos below. Blue-grey tanagers are friendly and confiding. Like the great kiskadee I wrote about a few weeks ago, blue-grey tanagers often live around human habitation.

All of the photos in the collage below are of one bird as it was hopping around in a Cercropia tree near our cabana. It is a very pretty bird with the blue above and grey below, but the large cercropia leaves shaded the splendor of the blue. I am anxious to get back to Belize to photograph it in more flattering light.