spider and tadpole eyeballs

The usual forays occurred today.

No, I don’t get tired of these, thanks for asking. Eastern blue-eyed grass.

This spider was, no kidding, chasing me. I’d back off, it would follow. It hid under a leaf for a while, no doubt contemplating how many bites it could get out of me. I lifted away the leaf and trained the camera on it. And realized I could see an eye. Or two. Glaring at me balefully.
The Trillium Report:

A few are actually open, and the pollen’s already making a mess on the petals. Not shown: a trillium with bite marks in the petals.  Others haven’t quite opened.

And of course, some are just popping up from the underworld now.

Blue cohosh update:

One of them has already popped open a flower!

Others, not so much. Those three beige stalks are last year’s stems. These things get pretty big, almost shrub-like.

A dandelion! With a, um, help me out, Karen – a pollinator of some kind. Bee? Fly? I like how it’s dusted with pollen.



Willow buds continue to express themselves gleefully.
We’re on our way to the wetland across the road, incidentally. How do you know this? The willow. Willows enjoy hanging out near water.
Plenty of tadpole action today. Most of them were burrowing into the muck at the bottom. This one came up towards the surface into the sun.

I love its eyes – you can see the pupils. No news on the various egg masses.

There’s a great moss colony on a rock over here.
In the afternoon, a friend came over and we headed up into the woods for an adventure.

This is a crappy picture – it’s a spring beauty, and there were masses and masses of these. They deserve better than this – I’ll get better pictures another time. We saw loads of trout lily leaves and canada mayflower, too.

A sugar maple sapling from last year, just a few inches tall – it has one terminal bud, just unfolding into a couple of leaves. Hi sweetie!

Here’s its cousin, a striped maple.