A few new arrivals in the yard:
I believe this butterfly is a Common Buckeye.
After a brief thunderstorm, this young Northern Mockingbird seemed very unhappy with its damp and disheveled feathers.
And I would love some help identifying this moth. Any ideas?
A few recent images from the yard…
And finally, this last picture makes me a little sad. When she was a young dog, before the arthritis and hearing loss and vision loss, Indigo was a dedicated rabbit-chaser…
Red Wing Park is one of my favorite places to visit when I crave a short walk. Or when I’m in the mood for butterflies. Yesterday, I discovered several new attractions, including lotus blooms in an artificial pond and a skink basking on the pond’s rock border.
Butterflies were out in droves, even a few species I have never seen before. (Add these to the Snowberry Clearwing Moths in yesterday’s post…)
I caught several images of a large, unfamiliar swallowtail. I can’t tell if these are Pipevine Swallowtails or Spicebush Swallowtails. Maybe both species were present? Any ideas?
One individual had a mangled hindwing, with more than half of the wing amputated. In marked contrast to the other butterflies, this one struggled in flight. It flailed and fluttered along in short spurts, stopping to perch on flowers rather than hovering as it drank. It continued to feed and flirt with its companions, but it was decidedly less agile.
As far as wing injuries go, this was as bad as I’ve seen. I felt an uncomfortable surge of empathy, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the wound was painful. The encounter has turned me philosophical.
It’s just a butterfly. An insect. An ephemeral creature, at best. And yet, its fate affected me. I am reminded of that jaded cliche about chaos theory, the one where a butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world, causing an alteration in the weather pattern of another part of the world. What of this butterfly’s damaged wing? What currents of change might eddy in its wake?
Publication note: My poem “The Road” was published at vox poetica this week. It is now posted on the poemblog. Many thanks to editor Annmarie Lockhart!
Several years ago, one of my doctors recommended twenty minutes of sunlight per day as part of a treatment plan for depression. (Sunscreen first, of course.) Since then, it seems that more and more medical professionals want to talk about the health benefits of natural light. And I’m eager to listen.
I don’t know if anyone has studied or quantified the healing properties of sunlight, but personal experience convinces me to keep dragging myself outside. Even when the weather is bad. Especially when the weather is bad. It’s easy to feel content standing in a sun-soaked yard. Less easy when the yard is rain soaked, or iced over, or clotted with smog.
In winter, when I sometimes miss my twenty minutes, I lapse into dark moods and sleepy hazes. During the summer, when I average quite a bit more than twenty minutes, I suffer far fewer episodes of depression and/or anxiety.
At first, I tried reading during my sunlight minutes, which led to a few unfortunate sunburns due to forgetting the time (or going to sleep, depending on the book). Then I tried walking, which quickly deteriorated into fitful laps around the yard. I talked on the phone, weeded flower beds, trimmed roses, and doodled in notebooks as poem fragments refused to become poems. I played with the dog and painted the deck. Nothing took. Nothing worked well enough to become a routine, not until my new camera arrived.
Weeks rolled into months as I experimented with the zoom and macro functions. My twenty minutes of sunlight became twenty minutes of photography, which became this blog. Despite appearances, this isn’t a photography blog or writing blog or poetry blog. It’s a depression and anxiety blog. A sunlight and yard blog, measured in twenty minute increments.
Yesterday’s twenty minutes found a honey bee, a moth, and a spider web (look away, if you’re arachnophobic…)
After the spiderweb, my twenty minutes stretched into an hour, due to this butterfly. (I believe it is an Eastern Tailed Blue.) It flitted through the sparse patches of clover in our back yard, ignoring my eccentric hands-and-knees pursuit. Today I have a mild sunburn and the remnants of a grass-allergy rash, but I also have these photos…
Last night, a solitary question mark butterfly stopped in the yard. It didn’t stay long. The yard might have felt lonely and empty after it left, if not for these two rabbits.
I wondered about the second rabbit’s ear damage. Frostbite? Maybe some kind of infection? While the yard’s rabbits seem healthy in general, I do see a lot of ticks on them, especially on their ears. It’s a bit odd, because I rarely find ticks on myself or the dog.
Speaking of the dog, she’s too old and arthritic for rabbit chasing. Or any other kind of exertion. So I was curious, a few days ago, when she treed something in the wax myrtle.
The squirrel waited, shifting its grip now and then, until Indigo and I went inside. Then I watched from the kitchen window as it scrambled down, grabbed one last mouthful of birdseed, and scurried across the fence into our neighbor’s yard. Where the neighbor’s dog promptly treed it again.
None of these photos were taken today, because today has been rainy and gray. It’s a dreary deluge that pours and eases and then pours again. As I worked on this post, the butterfly’s bright orange and the yard’s exuberant green tempted me to fret over our much-needed rain. So I changed the photos to grayscale…
Rae Spencer 