It's been a while, hasn't it. It's been a very soggy May, so when I found myself home early enough from work with some scant sun this afternoon I had to get out there...soak up some spring....why yes, I will happily settle for a dandelion!

The willow down by the culvert is in full-bore explosion. Here's one just starting to open up:

The Mighty Lumix (the camera I had with me today) is who chose to focus on the yellow bits. The Nikon lets me choose where to focus, but I left it at home. Lumix it is, then. The cool thing about the Lumix is, it's small enough for me to use it to get shots I can't actually get to with my own eyes - such as the underside of mushrooms. I'll only know what was there, once I transfer the pictures to my laptop. 

This explains the happy discovery of an ant on a somewhat older willow bud: Hello!

The internet informs me that these are both the staminate (meaning male) flowers of a willow. Excellent. Onwards.

Boy, am I rusty: I failed to confirm species. Beech, I believe. So fuzzy! Who knew? (Well, I did, but it still makes me grin to see it every year.)

shroom condos. See, the Mighty Lumix can do these things for me.

And now, for the pièce de resistance:

THE FIRST JACK I'VE SEEN THIS YEAR!

the nature of the void.

Kev and I went out for a walk this morning. I say "morning", even though it was really early afternoon; such are the wonders of being able to sleep in of a Sunday morn. I foolishly didn't bring either the Mighty Lumix or the Nikon, but being me, I dawdled here and there, snapping crappy close-ups with my phone. And all this rubbed off on the dear boy, because he was looking attentively all around him, and spotted a couple of jack-in-the-pulpits for me.

Not even opened up! Way to go, Kev-o. Later on in our walk, we were headed toward the beaver pond for a status update, and I found my own jack - like the one of the other day, close to the bottom of the driveway.

Each and every one of these is a thrill. 

AND, Solomon's seal abounds as well, along the way to the pond.

She's filling up nicely! 

Hours later, while Kev was off to softball (a double-header, no less) I headed out again, and again, didn't think to bring the 'real' cameras. After all, it was past 6 pm, the light wasn't that great, and "what is there to see?"

Silly me.

I found a mess of teeny Golden Alexanders on the north side of the field on the way out to the road. 

Oh, for the Nikon's zoom lens...

And some type of fern encased in... foam wrapping.

or at least that what it looked like to me.

By now I was pretty close to the pussy willows near the mailbox, I wonder what they're up to...

busy, busy, busy...

Next, I bring you - drum roll please - my oldest white baneberry friend. I've known this guy for like, six or seven years now. Kevin spotted it first, on our walk together earlier, but the best picture of the several I took was from my solo walk:  heaven forfend I arrange pictures out of order. It would violate the... journalistic integrity of this project.

Check out the way the flower buds look like they're being clasped by a hand...I guess that's a leaf, wrapped around them. "Journalistic integrity" indeed... I suspect you need actual readers for your writing to count as anything vaguely journalistic, and I'm pretty sure I'm typing merrily into a void. Who has the time/patience to read this? 

"If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?" comes to mind.

Where was I? Oh. Flowers and whatnot. We're just inundated with trillium. Trillia?

This one was up in the mystery woodland. It pleases me to find 'em under the trees, regardless of whether anyone is there to see them. 

The saxifrage, on the other hand, I knew to expect. I promised The Void that I'd get to this with the Nikon: first sunny day! First sunny day!

Blurry because they're friggin' TINY.

I leave off with a magnolia queen upon her throne. 

TRILLIUM.

It's my day off, and the sky is an expanse of deep blue. Mmm mmm good. There's been this strange cold virus out and about - it nips your heels for a week or two, and then when you're not looking, it sucker punches you. Then, a few days later, when you're all "I'm on the mend, yay!" it kneecaps you. So the running has been a bit erratic lately. But today, I finally got a solid run in. I NEED to get a couple of half marathons on the schedule for this summer. Or...this fall, at the rate I'm going. 

I wasn't going to photograph the daffodils today - "it's just daffodils" - if you ever find yourself saying shit like that? "just daffodils"? You need your head examined. 

On the way to greeting the daffodils, I realized the playtex tampon applicator flowers were in full bloom. 

They're actually a heath.



I was heading out toward the mailbox to check out the pussy willow situation.

Huh. Somewhat worse for wear. Not sure what happened. 

Another kind of willow is just starting to pop.

This one's half in half out of its cloak.

The basswood down by the stream says "who are you lookin' at?"

AND BIG NEWS, because I knew to look for it and ONLY because I knew to look for it, TRILLIUM!!!!! I counted eight.

O Happy Day. 

pussy willows exploding, gray birch party hats, and big news

You can't always be fluff.

You gotta speak out at times.

Like, say for instance, this pussy willow. 

Ta-da! Goodbye, fluff...hello, delight. 

oh god, this makes me so happy.

I wonder if the southern sides tend to ripen up more, as would be suggested here:

Meanwhile, along the side of the road, near the edge of a former-and-soon-to-be-future beaver pond, we have speckled alder beginning to rock out. 

See the one in the middle, at the top, starting to expand?

BAM, I'll tell you wut.

I really, really, wanted the Nikon and its zoom lens today, but I hadn't used it in a while and the battery needed to be recharged. I can't wait to get all up in this alder's grill with it. Right now it all just looks like a confusing mess.

Not a great great shot, but I'm starting to remember there are little individual niblets in there. I'm guessing anthers, again?

Back to the gray birch's party hats:

Once you've noticed these, you can't un-see them. If you know you have some sorta birch with catkins happening in your world, go take a look and see if any of its buds are exploding like this. 

Sometimes you get lucky and see two right up next to each other. I'm not sure how they avoid reproducing with themselves. 

In other news, THE BEAVERS ARE BACK. Ever since That Bitch Irene blew out the dam on our pond, we've had...no pond. The beavers never really left left, they just went a little upstream for a few years and then a little downstream for a few years. A few days ago our neighbor noticed some activity and lo, he told me about it today. 

Hallelujah. The pond's coming back.

a warm day + brain melt

First time I've used the Mighty Lumix in a long time; I had to fiddle with it to remember its settings.

Yellow birch, hop hornbeam; toes intertwined.

An 80+ degree day after weeks of 40s or below; I have the added discombobulation of having a cold, and hence, no energy.

gray birch female flower, aka the party hat. these little fuscia ganglies mystified me for years before I stumbled across an understanding of what they are.

The male flowers - the catkins - are a little easier to spot. 

this makes me jones for the macro lens of the nikon. I'll have to haul it out.

onwards to the pussy willow...

...complete with bud scale. 

Then I realized the SD reader in my laptop isn't working, so I wound up using our backup laptop - an old one we stream tv on, it's running the loathed Windows 10 - loading pictures up into google drive, and then getting them onto my laptop from there. lo, what a hassle.

I feel like shit.

Rumor has it the spring peepers will be singing soon. Yes, please.

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.