Happy Labor Day

 

The golden northern bumble bee -- laboring. Have a great holiday! 

Autumn is Coming

 

Leaves have started to change and fall in my neighborhood. 

Mushrooms are popping up overnight. 

Some of them with faces. 

Fowers are beginning to fade. 

Autumn is coming. 

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "When summer opens, I see how fast it matures and fear it will be short; but after the heats of July and August, I am reconciled, like one who has had his swing, to the cool of autumn." I'm with him. 

Egret ID Tips

Almost all of the white egrets in marshes along the New Jersey shore are either snowy egrets or great egrets. The one above is a snowy. It has a black bill and yellow feet. 

This is a great egret. The colors are reversed: it has a yellow bill and black feet. It's also about a third larger than a snowy. It's easy to know your egrets! 😀

Mid-August

 

An eastern tiger swallowtail butterfly on wild bergamot. Click to enlarge.

                           

   “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” 

                                                                                                       – Rabindranath Tagore

These are the Dog Days

 

And this is a dog day cicada. It appeared on my porch this morning, right on schedule. I heard cicadas singing in the trees last night for the first time this year. Click to enlarge.

The so-called dog days extend from July 3 to August 11. During this time, the constellation Canis Major, the Big Dog, rises at about the same time as the sun. It gets blamed for the hot muggy weather of the hottest part of summer. There are several kinds of dog day cicadas across North America that emerge in late summer during the dog days and get their common name from it. 

This time of year you won't see any flashy red-eyed cicadas like this, though. It's one of several species of periodical cicada that are famous for explosivele emergences on 13 or 17 year schedules. They only come out is spring, and not annually. But... dog day cicadas are on the job every year. 

Summer Sights

 

Just pictures of summer today. Here is an inviting path under blue sky with a fleet of clouds coming in. Click to enlarge. 

A micro world of turkey tail mushrooms, lichens, and moss. 

A painted turtle with a white water lily. 

Light shining through the bristly fringe of a resting robber fly. 

The big snapping turtle swiming in green water. 

Snapping turtle's face.  

A bumblebee on wild bergamot. 

A common whitetail dragonfly on the ground. 

And an orange sunset on the Delaware River. 

Sundew Flowers

 

I had a nice walk this week in the relative cool snap. This is the view from my favorite picnic spot at Franklin Parker Preserve in the New Jersey Pine Barrens. See that floating log in the lower right foreground? Click to enlarge. 

There were many such logs. Note the pretty red fringe along the top. It's sundew plants. They are among the famous carnivorous plants of the region. Their red leaves are covered with droplets of sticky fluid that trap insects. The plant digests them and incorporates their nutrients. It helps the plants get by in nutrient-poor soils. Sundews have made a career out of it.  

Right now they are flowering. That poses a small dilemma. How does a sticky insect-trapping plant avoid trapping an insect that it hopes will take some pollen and fly away to pollinate another plant's flower? They just grow long stems, stems that hold the flowers high above the traps. See the white flowers way up over the bushy red mass? Each stem ends in a flower and is lined with buds that will bloom sequentially. That's a great solution, you tricky plants!