I don’t know if this cardinal is undergoing a normal (extreme) molt, or if he has some kind of medical condition. Whatever the cause, this kind of feather loss seems to be common.
nature
So Many Dragonflies!
More and more dragonflies! (As usual, the identifications are mostly guesswork. Please comment to confirm or correct!)
Male Great Blue Skimmer?
Female Great Blue Skimmer
Unknown. (Possibly one of the skimmers?)
Female Eastern Amberwing
June Bugs
For me, “June bug” is synonymous with “summer”. I have vivid memories of a yard teeming with these large beetles, loud with the drone of their wings. There was a trick to catching them, a certain turn in their flight that signaled they were landing. Watch, watch, watch, then race across the yard to the spot where one had just disappeared into the grass. I remember the pinch and scratch of their legs and the sharp odor they left on my hands.
Here in Virginia, summer after summer has passed with no June bugs. Since leaving Tennessee, I’ve only seen one or two. Until this week. Seemingly out of nowhere, dozens of them have buzzed into the yard. It’s been a blissful dose of nostalgia, watching them come and go, listening to their heavy flight. I’m no longer interested in catching them, except with my camera, but I smell them on my skin again. Their unexpected arrival is a breezy memory that makes me yearn for another sprint through the sunlit yard of my youth.
It never occurred to me, before beginning this post, that what I know as a June bug might not be the same insect that everyone knows as a June bug. For clarification, when I say “June bug”, I actually mean green June beetle.
To further complicate matters, I photographed the next beetle on the same day, thinking it was simply a small individual of the same species. Turns out, this is probably an entirely different species, an Emerald Euphoria beetle.
A few years ago, Mother called me after hearing a song on the radio called “Junebug Waltz”. She loved the song so much that she searched out the CD, It Don’t Mean I Don’t Love You by Hurray for the Riff Raff. I’m grateful to her for introducing me to the song, and the group.
Rainy Respite
This moth took shelter on our porch as a morning thunderstorm growled through the area. After the storm calmed, a steady rain settled over the yard, lasting all afternoon. It was a pleasant, sleepy kind of rain, gradually washing away the weekend’s heat and dust. Washing away the weekend’s bees and dragonflies, too, for the moment.
I believe the first dragonfly is an Eastern Pondhawk, and the second a Great Blue Skimmer. I haven’t found a possible match for the first moth, but the second seems to be a Grape Leaffolder moth. (I’m gaining confidence with dragonflies, but I’m a complete beginner with moths. Please comment with confirmations or corrections!)
Sunlight
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…
Rae Spencer 