lunch in the lilacs

We have a small lilac bush at the front of the house and yesterday, as I came in from checking the mail, I gave it a quick once-over. I spotted the iridescent wing of a something-something. Squinted at it. Oh my: a syrphid fly had been invited to lunch by a crab spider. Fetchez le camera!

“Welcome!”

“You look marvelous! Have you lost weight?”

“I love your new look!”

There was a light breeze, which set the lilac blooms dancing. It was hard to get a good shot. I stabilized the branch for my own reasons, but the spider took advantage of the sudden (relative) stillness to manoeuver her guest into a better position:

Diner est servi!

The nice folks over at bugguide.net believe the guest to be a female Toxomerus geminatus. Although by now she’s been transmogrified into her host(ess), the spider. And so it goes.

15 minutes x 15 square feet = plenty to see

Part One: They are not called day lilies for nothing.

While we were traipsing around Pittsburgh last week, the day lilies at the side of the house were going great guns, leaving us only one flower, and one bud, to enjoy upon our return

Yesterday.

Note the weird extra stamen thingy seemingly attached to the edge of a petal.

Today. All shriveled up! Just like that!

That extra stamen thingy is poking out. Still hoping to get lucky, I guess.

Part Two: Camouflage and Ambush

I sat in the grass just outside the front door, hoping to lure crickets or grasshoppers near me with the sheer innocence of my intentions. That didn’t happen. I figured if I trained the macro on some nearby tiny daisies, maybe I’d be happily surprised.

Indeed, I was. A spider!

Might there be others, on nearby flowers? Why yes!

A fly came in for a landing. 

Within a nano-second s/he was waving its legs menacingly at it. I wasn’t fast enough to get the fly on camera.

Unsuccessful, it backed around to the underside of the flower.

Better luck next time, sweetie.

Part Three: Speaking of Lunch

While all this was going on, I was also admiring some sort of long damselfly-type fly resting on the tip of a blade of grass. I got closer and closer.

It was when I saw little legs waving around futilely that I realized there was more going on here.

I watched them wrestle for a while.

To the tune of several dozen photographs, which I’ll spare you.

Part Four: Back to the Mysterious Asiatic Dayflower

They’re back! This time, I swear, I shall pay more attention day by day.

The Side View.

The Top Down View

The Indeterminate (Before, or After, Flowering?) View

speaking of naughty bits

Remember the Venetian slippers of the day lilies at the orgy?

Their little feet and legs are covered in pollen these days.

Nearby, the lone pistil.

Glinting mischievously.

A few feet away, a yellow lily.

…and its pistil.

Time for spiders on the black-eyed susans.

Howdy!

Same flower, other side. Someone else.

This here’s a tussock moth. I tried to film it as it scurried back and forth across the table on the deck. That was an artistic disaster – I couldn’t get it to focus. Eventually I took pity on it and carried it out to the shrubbery where I figured it would have better luck finding food.

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.

flowers in November, seed dissection, wrecked mushrooms: a good day

Attentive readers may have noticed that I’ve been a bit glum about the onset of fall this year – certain that the fun was over, there’s nothing to see here, move along, move along, see you next spring. Fortunately, the woods behind our house have been whispering to me over the past couple of weeks. “Pssssst.  Lady. Up here. Mushrooms. Mosses. Things you haven’t seen lately. Pssssst.”

(Am I the only one out there who perceives life this way?) (Oh, right: doesn’t matter. You’re in charge of your perceptions; I’m in charge of mine.)

Anyhoo, I wandered around today, some in the normal spots, and some up in the woods, attentive to those little whispers. Here’s the haul:

Pachysandra, invading the woods from its homebase around the magnolia tree. We last saw pachysandra on May 6th, when the flowers were forming and dare I say it, swelling.

Asters continue to delight with their fuzzballs.

The pieris bush. This is the one whose flowers look like spider-infested barnacles. And there is a bug, of some kind, right in the middle of the picture. Thank you, O Macro Lens, without thee this bush would just be a blob on the edge of the lawn.

Would somebody please tell the vinca that it’s friggin’ November already?

Screw you, says the vinca. I can do this all week. I’m not proud…or tired.

Spider sez, mind your own business. See that little thingy in the lower right? Stay tuned. Those things are EVERYWHERE.

I came across a lobelia, of the Indian Tobacco flavor (Lobelia inflata), on my way up into the woods.

Lovely inflated calyx, to use the verbiage in my flower guide.

No wait, really? You didn’t get the memo, either, huh? Wow. I’ll keep an eye on this, because I’m not sure if it’s just opening up, or just closing down. When open, the lobelia flowers I’ve seen around here look more like this.

Remember the mushrooms growing in a stump up the hill? Well, someone went to town on them. I am not sure if mushrooms spontaneously fall apart, or if critters are involved, but at any rate, check this out:

Carnage, either way.

I spent a fair amount of time sussing out the mystery of a tiny turkey-foot shaped object that I have noticed in the bazillions over recent weeks. They’re everywhere – on the deck, on leaves, on our shower mat…

Here’s one.

I have suspected the birch trees, just on general principle. But I’m not sure if it’s yellow, gray, or white birch. (We have all three. Plus there’s black birch generally around here, but not in my usual wanderings.)

Look, another one.

I finally figured out that that’s probably the conveyance part, and the actual seed is this thing:

(A double-duty photo. Please to admire the fantastic shroomage.)

I also discovered that if you take an innocent birch catkin…

…and rip it to shreds, you’ll see that my theory is more-or-less right.

Here we have the two bits still stuck together.

As exciting as this is (and isn’t it?) the best part was when I came across a stump I visited earlier in the summer. It’s completely covered in moss and canada mayflower. I realized that even though the mayflower has long since produced its flowers and berries, it’s still around, and once I knew what to look for, I saw the evidence everywhere.

 

Translucent white leaves are all that remain.

On the way back down to the house, I found the first gentian I ever saw – here’s what it looked like back on August 9th – it didn’t have flowers yet.

And here’s what that baby looks like now:

I’m not dead yet!

The running report: Achilles tendonitis notwithstanding, a girl’s got to run, and the next half marathon is coming up in a few months. Which reminds me, I should probably register for it before it’s too late. I knocked out what passes for a long run these days – 5.3 miles – and right around now, the cats are starting to pester me for dinner. So, sports fans, I’ll see you tomorrow.