spring peeper, ripening jewel weed, dive bombing dragonfly

The half marathon – the first-ever Monadnock Half Marathon – last Saturday went pretty well. It was hot and humid, and after about four or five miles I began feeling like my head was on fire. I ran with a nurse from the chemo unit where I volunteer every week giving Reiki to people – somehow I conned Carol, who’d never even done a 5K before this year, into giving this a shot. She was a champ! Every time we got to a water station, I poured half a cup of water over my head and drank the rest.
At about mile 10.5 we came to a pretty big hill – comparable to the steepest one I’ve got along my regular routes – which normally, I run up. (“Run” in the liberal sense of the word. A decent speed walker would overtake me.) But all of us within sight took this hill at a walk. Fortunately, it was pretty much downhill from mile 11 to the end.  And whaddaya know, I beat my previous best time by a handful of minutes. Although I trained to do just that, I’d given up hope of making a decent time when we went through that ghastly heat wave a few weeks ago and I realized the inherent silliness of trying to set a personal record in New England, in August, on a hilly course. VICTORY!
That was my third half marathon. The next one is an informal one this fall on Hilton Head, when I’ll be on vacation with my family. It won’t be a USTAF-certified course – it will be whatever my brother, sister-in-law, and I invent, and we’ll just persuade my mom, my sister, and sweet Kevin into standing in strategic places with water bottles.
Yesterday I lounged about indolently. Today, while hunting for monarch caterpillars, I found someone else entirely hiding under the wavy curve of a milkweed leaf:

It’s a spring peeper (Pseudacris crucifer)!  This completely made my day. He was panting quite visibly, so I zoomed in a made a short film of it. Naturally, he stopped breathing while I filmed, and – trying to hold the camera steady – so did I. It was a frog vs human show down. He won. I stopped filming, and he resumed breathing.

This is what a black-eyed susan looks like when it’s all done flowering.
New species alert! This is boneset (Eupatorium perfoliatum):

It’s similar to joe-pye weed – different leaf configuration, but same general idea – only it’s white, instead of pink. How many petals would you guess these flowers have?

Answer: five. They’re joined together in little cups, and the stringy things are presumably the stamens.
There’s a disturbing amount of purple loosestrife in the wet areas. Disturbing, because they outcompete the native cattails.

They’re pretty, sure…but evil.


I came across this dead dive bombing dragonfly.

Isn’t that wild?
Oh, I lied, I did do something yesterday. I’d noticed a big branch had fallen into the brook that we cross over to get to our house, so yesterday we waded in and dragged it up onto the bank…where I noticed a whole SLEW of jack-in-the-pulpits. We positioned the branch to not squash any of them. Today I went back with the camera.

That’s the branch in the background.
OK, back to today. My other goal for today (aside from finding monarch caterpillars – FAIL), was to capture the moment when a jewel weed flower opens. Victory! Let’s review:
Not Yet Open:


Open:


VICTORY! Just opening up!


And, another time-lapse special, here we have bud to seed, all on one plant.

Let’s have a closer look:

I found a whole slew of sensitive fern spores, still green:

Like money in the bank.
And got another new-to-me species, willow herb perhaps Epilobium coloratum.



In other news, the roundleaved dogwood berries have been ripening. July 5 – they were still green.

A month later, the berries are ripening and stems going red


And just a few days later, they’re nearly all BLUE!

transformation takes many shapes.

Just another day in paradise.  Much to my annoyance, a milkweed along the side of our driveway that showed no signs of anything happening just three days ago, suddenly produced this while I wasn’t looking:
 
(That’s my delicate ladylike pinky finger there, which has been scientifically measured at 1/4” wide.) Later on, I found a different milkweed on our neighbor’s property that is just STUDDED with flowers – it did way better in the reproduction game than the ones in our driveway.

As you can see, several of the flowers seem to be busy with incipient pod-formation. I haven’t noticed anything that looks like a monarch caterpillar on the way, but I may not be looking for the right things or in the right places.
At this time of year, while new flowers do show up, there are plenty of old buddies to check in on.

Crowfoot (Ranunculus allegheniensis). This hasn’t really seemed to change much since the middle of June, when it looked like this. (As for the flower – click here for just two months ago.)
In the meantime, the False Solomon’s Seal berries are getting bigger, and still look gold from afar. But lovely and speckled up close.


White baneberry’s “doll’s eyes” berries are also ripening – in their case…

…to an eerie white.
Golden Alexander looks about the same as it did a month ago.

You wouldn’t know that, because apparently the last time I mentioned this flower here, it still had its petals. But trust me: all is ho hum in Golden Alexander land. Perhaps things are furiously happening under the surface.
But Ah! Much has changed with the roundleaved dogwood!

The stems have gone bright red! This made me laugh, as I wasn’t expecting it. That’s one of the virtues of being an amateur – everything surprises me. Although come to think of it, other kinds of dogwood also have a habit of red twigs. Still, though, I wasn’t expecting it. I will be expecting it, however, with that white baneberry.
Down by the road, the Eastern Joe-Pye Weed is going great guns.

Bees of many stripes are all over the emerging blossoms.
The cattails are going brown, generally from the top down.

…which makes sense, since it’s at the top of the what you see here that the male flower bits are divided from the female flower bits. The female flowers closest to the males apparently got fertilized sooner?
I noticed a new species today, maybe two, that are very similar.

In both kinds, the leaves are super divided and toothed – basically, really lacy leaves.

In both, all the flower action is in densely-studded racemes (that’s clusters of flowers along, and mostly at the end, of a stalk).  In some of them, the flowers look like this:

Zooming in…little fuzzy capsules, jammed close together.

(Then I got distracted by this awesome fly – TINY – perched on the tip of one of these unopened flower sprays.)

Back to the flowers. I realized that in other examples, the flowers were more in a long spike, ranged evenly along the flower stalk.

(Whoops, blurry. It’s my only shot at this perspective, though.)

I maneuvered the camera to get a look up into these little flower bits – they’re open on the underside.

oh, WOW.
Some of these are…fertilized, I guess.

Honestly, just when I thought I’d seen it all, some new plant wanders in with a completely new way of doing things. This is crazy. You have to understand, each little green cap is maybe…at most, 1/16” of an inch across. I have NO CLUE what this/these plants are.
In other exciting news, I filmed a sleeping (presumably) caterpillar. Did you know they sort of breathe? I mean, sort of, in that they don’t have lungs, really. They have little holes along their sides called spiracles, and they expand and contract their segments to force air in and out. I guess that counts as breathing, right? Anyway, this guy was hanging out on the edge of the table we have in our magic portable screened in porch.

If you can stand 42 seconds of thrilling excitement, watch him (her?) breathe. 

Once you’ve watched a caterpillar stirring in its dreams, you kind of tend to take an interest in the little bugger. According to the angels at bugguide.net, this is a Heterocampa guttivitta, and according to wiki.bugwood.org, whose pictures appear below, it goes through a bunch of stages (“instars”) before arriving at its ultimate Basic Gray Moth destiny.

Who knew that just becoming a moth was so complicated? Maybe I should cut myself some slack for all the various twists and turns my own life has taken.

june is busting out all over and bonus dragonfly

Let’s start with Pieris bush – the one whose flowers looked like spider-filled barnacles. The berries are just popping.

A few days ago - May 28.

Today

Similar story for the Solomon’s Seal.

And now, for the Siberian Irises:

Black raspberry canes, the bane of my existence, are flowering. Which means that as usual, I’ll forgive vast swathes of them, since I do tend to forage in the yard at the end of summer…

“pick me! pick me!” (dogwood.)

And this is why I can’t find any of the trillium to show you how their seeds are shaping up. It’s just a jungle out there. Front and center: blue cohosh.

In the meantime, over by the gardenshed, the rhododendron is exploding.

As well as a third azalea, to go with the red and the coral azalea.

This modest-looking dragonfly was hanging out on our front steps. Based on bugguide.net, I’m going with Chalk-fronted Corporal - Ladona julia