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!

I should have taken basket weaving

Recent snail sightings – species unknown, but Oxyloma retusum seems like a possibility.
On goldenrod leaves:


In the husk of musk mallow seed cases:


On a stalk of curly dock:


On jewelweed leaves:


Speaking of musk mallow seed cases, aren’t they gorgeous?

new things happen all the time

I found something I’ve never seen before – which feels like a treat at this point in the year, as I ready myself for fall and the inevitable fading away of All Lovely Newness. I’m always happy to be proved wrong, as I was in spectacular fashion:

Waaaahhh!! How cool is this? It’s groundnut, also called wild bean (Apios americana). Its flowers have a “distinctive, sweetish odor” – amen to that. It’s a vine – here it is ambitiously scaling a tree:

It’s irregular flower day around here. I found a new stash of butter-and-egg (Linaria vulgaris) flowers:

How does this thing even get pollinated? The darker yellow part looks like it’s obstructing access to the nether regions of the flower. Hm.  Somehow fertilization must happen, because here we see what I’m assuming are the stigma, after all the petal-like parts have given way.
 
In other exciting news, I found what I thought at first was an adult ladybug about to emerge from the pupa. Imagine my surprise when it started walking around and flew away!

It turns out that this is a tortoise beetle. That name makes sense, given that it looks like it has an extra shell over its shell. God, being the beetle fiend that s/he is, made a bunch of these: there are 114 species of these in North America and Canada alone, according to bugguide.net. I was happy to make the acquaintance of just one of them, since this morning, I didn’t even know these existed. I’ll bet you didn’t, either, right?
I had some fun observing a musk mallow (Malva moschata). First, on one of the leaves, we have this awesome pair of whatevers (snails?) (but they have pointy shells. Do they still count as snails if their shells aren’t the classic snail shape?)

They were perched over the volcanic abyss of the the nearest flower blossom:


Peering into the depths of said volcano…

oooohhhh…
Meanwhile, the sepals that enclose the flower buds stick around after the petals fall off, and then start to fall apart, thusly:

Presumably there’s a seed or two enclosed in that basket-like structure.
They’re still blooming, though:

Oh! there’s another new species! I actually saw it the other day, but didn’t post about it because all the yellow flowers were clamoring to be featured, and this flower is white.

This is virgin’s bower (Clematis virginiana). I love how you can see, in the bud just opening up in the lower right of the photo, all those stamens raring to go.
And, another new species showed up in my awareness today. I believe it’s a gentian, but I’ll have to wait til the flowers open to confirm:

That looks promising, doesn’t it?