Blackbirds and Mystery Object

        Just for the record, the blackbirds (Redwings, Grackles, Rusty Blackbirds, etc.) are starting to gather for their fall migration. We had a good sized group in our front woodlot yesterday evening.

        Meanwhile, back under a bench, I found a mystery object. I do know know if is it from an animal, a plant, or a fungus. My guess is fungus but if anyone knows, please pass the information along. It is just over 1 cm in height and about the same in diameter. It is under one of our outdoor benches.  Any ideas?

 

A Flower Pod and a Dragonfly

        According to the google stats, my blog site has been viewed 47 times already but not one comment. I wonder who is doing all the looking. . .

        It was a great morning for photos on the dog walk. Wish I had time to post more of them but I like to crop and tidy up images before putting them up so two will have to do.

        This first photo is of the seed pod from Indian Tobacco or Lobélie gonflée in French. Lobelia inflata is the Latin name.

        Just before I finished my walk I saw this dragonfly. According to my dragonfly book this is a male Common Green Darner (Anax junius). 

• Fleur-Ange Lamothe, Jennifer Slawek and Lorena Olmstead like this.
• 

  Fleur-Ange Lamothe Delightful.

  12 hours ago · Like
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  Heron Driftwood Anything but "common", that photo of the dragonfly is!

  11 hours ago · Like

In the Pink

I am a bit slow getting this photo up but better late than never, I hope. It is a Deptford Pink, Oeillet arméria in French or Dianthus armeria in Latin. It was growing in the Hendrie Valley wilderness area of the Royal Botanical Gardens. This part of the RBG is within the city limits of Burlington, Ontario. With the help of some others who came out on wild flower walks with Fleur-Ange and I, we found over 160 species of wild or naturalized flowers blooming in the last 10 days.

Below is a photo that I had on Facebook a few days ago. I took it off today to put up here as I am choosing to  put fewer photo there but still want to share some photos. This is a Crowned Slug Moth caterpillar that I found in our east pasture area.

Sheet Lightning and a Slug

OK, the sheet lightning and the slug did not happen on the same day and I did not get a photo or video of the sheet lightning. The sheet lightning was this morning. When I checked to see if my memory of the term was correct I found that it is correct but also called heat lightning. In either case, it is just lightning that is so far away that it only light the clouds and no thunder is heard so it's like a sheet of light crossing the sky in silence. There was a lot this morning and it seemed to be coming from several directions but mostly in the west so I suspect we might get some of the regular lightning, thunder and rain sometime in the near future.

The slug? I found it last Thursday on a One-seeded Bur Cucumber down by the Grand River. It was eating it's way across a leaf and just happened to be thinking about taking a short cut across an open space when I saw it.

Another New Start?

OK, I am dusting this blog off again. I stopped putting photo on Flickr a couple of months ago as they changed their format and started jamming all the photos together with hardly any white space in between them. It offends my sense of how to look at photos and photos often jar each other when they are that close. Now Facebook has decided to share all the photos and act as if they are their property instead of mine so I think I am going to return to doing more work on this blog. I realize that photos can be stolen from here just as easily but the public exposure will be a lot less and I shall not be using words to describe my photos in the uploads but only in the text of the blog. I am hoping that will reduce the number of hits by unwanted people. I suspect that bots can still search the text of blogs but maybe less here than on Facebook. We'll see what happens . . .

Here is a photo of a Preying Mantis that I had up the other day on FB.