mud season, alders, cattails...

We could hear the red-winged blackbirds - the males - across the (former) pond this morning. First time this year - February 25 - in years past, that's happened pretty much on the equinox. So, early.

It's been warmer lately and with the snowmelt, the stream that runs through our property has swollen considerably. I went out for a walk before breakfast with just the phone for a camera. Macro is generally unsatisfactory on the phone but I feel like I synced my brain a little better today.

My last shot before things seemed to click: this is what I think of as a pretty typical attempt at a somewhat close-up on my phone. It looks great on the phone itself, but any bigger, and it gets unacceptably blurry to me.

 

last year's female catkins.

Still, though, it inspired me to spend a little while letting the phone figure out how to focus on what I wanted it to focus on. 

There we go. 

This year's male catkins? sheesh, that specificity of knowledge has been put in back storage, apparently. It's been a while.

Onto the perennial favorite, exploded cattails. I think these shots came out okay....I should get out the Nikon with its macro lens and re-train my brain to really see the world...

Oh, fluffy goodness.

They should call these 'catbellies'.

No wonder this stuff used to be used as bedding. 

The Nikon would be even better at getting the mist drops.

Zero clue who this is - I need to brush up.

Ahhhh, mud season... 

It's the weekend. Fortunately, "The Hidden Life of Trees" became available from the library, via Kindle. I already know, a few paragraphs into the prologue, that I'm going to have to buy this one. 

sunday ramblings

 

Fall’s definitely on its way. The milkweed pods are nowhere near opening up, but they are losing their green.

july 24

september 16

Bittersweet nightshade berries are so translucent, that you can make out the seeds inside them.

Jewelweed – aka “touch me not” – flower. Loving the texture.

 

cattails lose all dignity when they go to seed.

 

I was aiming for the flowers of the japanese knotweed, but found this wasp instead.

And now, for the jester’s hat of the campion’s seedhead:

there are goodies to behold inside.

it took me a few tries to focus on the mysteries within.

oooohhhh! another whole little world in there! I explored all this last september, too – you can see that here.

spider harassment, goldenrods, exploding cattail, and run-on sentences

I told a friend the other day that we were down to goldenrods and asters up here (she’s from the tropics of Massachusetts), but today I was pleased to prove myself wrong:

We have a reprieve of black-eyed susans.


Or, from another perspective…


I had fun bugging the spider.
Next door, a neighboring susan was covered in aphids:


But it’s true: a lot of asters are still blooming. Next year, I’ll start to differentiate between them all. This one’s the “big purple kind”.


As for the goldenrod, we have the almost done cooking stage…


…and the done cooking stage.

Actually, look again: two of the clumps above haven’t opened because the tip-ends of flower stamens haven’t completely dried up and fallen off yet.
The cattails are engaged in a competition to see who can explode the most, the fastest. Current contenders include:

Bittersweet nightshade does this awesome thing.

The flowers, as you might recall, are purple. The leaves are normally green. By now the flowers are long gone. It’s as though the plant was like “oh wait – something needs to be purple here – you! leaves! turn purple, stat!”
We still have some soapwort (Saponara officinalis) blooming.

But a lot of them look like this now.

Can you see the bug hiding out in the post-bloom at lower left?
Something else still blooming: japanese knotweed, a roadside invasive the stalks of which are apparently edible.

Such teensy flowers. It’s curious: some plants get their flowers going first thing, before even generating leaves (think, coltsfoot. Flowers show up first thing in spring, and right around now, their huge leaves dominate roadside ditches). And this guy, the knotweed, isn’t bothering with flowers til the very end of the season. Hm. I wonder if the fact that japanese knotweed is apparently so good at propagating from even cuttings (to such an extent that I’ve been advised, should I be so brave as to eat it, not to put any of it into the compost pile unless I want the side of our hill to be taken over by knotweed) (end of sentence: coming soon) …that it can afford to do the seed game late in the season. There’s a study in here somewhere, probably.

a net of diamonds

So, does the spider say “dammit!” or does the spider say, “excellent, look at all this drinking water?”


Some kind of mold or fungus is troubling some of the evening primrose seed pods. I don’t remember seeing this last year. Of course, last year, I didn’t know this was primrose. In fact, if you look at this here post from about this time last year, I have learned a ton since then. I was taking pictures of the same species, but didn’t know what they were. Yee haw!
Anyway, back to the primrose…

The ones at the top of the stalk – this stalk, incidentally, is maybe four feet tall – are the newest, and largely still green.


Down the stalk a bit, they’re starting to ripen. Which, once again, looks a lot like “decaying”, “dying”, “getting all oogy and brown”. There’s a life lesson in here somewhere.


Until at last you come to the opened-up pods with seeds inside.
A search for life and color leads us to the world of lichens and mosses…



We live on an awesome planet.
I startled what I think is a spring peeper. Normally they have “X”’s on their backs, and I’ve sort of convinced myself that this one has the “X”, but it’s faint, which apparently can happen. All the other froggies around here are way more marked up, so I’m going with peeper for the time being.

Look at those tiny little fingers! As I told Kevin, who was chopping wood into kindling nearby, I think I’m in love.


Tasty shrooms.


This caterpillar does not seem bothered by all the spikies on the yellow foxtail. It’s eating all the seeds anyway. I took several pictures before figuring out which end’s the head, and which end’s the bum. Answer: head’s on the bottom. As for the plant: this time last year then I was calling yellow foxtail “that tall grassy thingy”. Maybe by this time next year I’ll know what kind of caterpillar that is. Or maybe it’s not a caterpillar. Maybe it’s a larva. Whatever that means. I think it means, similar stage in the lifecycle, but not going to end up a butterfly or moth.
Boatloads of mushrooms in the woods – I know nothing about mushrooms, so these will all be unidentified for now…

I took waaaayyyy more pictures of different mushroom than I’m posting, mostly because the light was crappy and they all wound up blurry, dark, etc. etc.


Is this snail not gorgeous? Look at the almost phosphorescent bits – is that in the shell? Are these body parts we’re looking at? Snails have – get this – lungs! Well, only one lung per. Also? Livers. Who knew?
It was a damp and occasionally drizzly day today. Not the greatest weather for putting laundry out on the deck to dry (oops!). And not so great for our friends, the windblown seeds.

cattail

thimbleweed (tall anemone)

OK, that was my afternoon. Happy rest-of-the-weekend, world!

how come you never hear the word “combobulate”?

What’s up with the purple gentian? This looked so promising at first, but not a one has bloomed.  At best we have a wilting into brown.

At worst we have an infestation of slime nuggets.

No, that’s not the worst. The worst is being eaten alive by some kind of mold when you have yet to unfurl your purple freak flag.

This is super blurry because I was being eaten alive too – by mosquitos. MOSQUITOS! In September! Arrrrggghhh!!! Very annoying.
Fall used to be my favorite season, hands-down. The change in the air, in the light; the smell of fallen leaves – pure exhilaration. Lately? Not so much. I’m having trouble adjusting. I think it’s because I’m still getting used to the new schedule/job – I don’t have NEARLY enough free time on my hands to dawdle and peer into flowers’ naughty bits and ask questions and research stuff. You know, the IMPORTANT stuff.

The trade-off for glorious berries is wilting leaves. I want to be the berry! Not the leaf!

More and more of the thimbleweed (tall anemone) is opening up. Dreams of baby anemones, made manifest.
OK, enough whining, sweet girl. Tomorrow I’ll be doing my Reiki volunteer gig at the hospital; there’s the possibility of an as-yet-not-figured-out hike with a friend, and dammit, I’m going for a run. And maybe I just need to adjust and start taking pictures of rotting and decaying things. It will be fun! Hooray! I could launch this new phase with a quick peek at the completely-squashed-flat baby snapping turtle I found in the shared driveway yesterday but I think I’ll spare you.
I guess once we cave in and get the woodstove going, I’ll be OK. What does the cattail think, when it goes from its nubbly velvet perfection…

to this?  Maybe it’s psyched, actually.