Justfolk's photos

I was in the garden when I started hearing conversations on the water below. A flotilla of ten kayaks was passing. These are three of them. They said if I took pictures of them to please put them where they could see them. I will. And then they were past the point and I couldn't see them, nor hear.

This was a couple of days ago, on the sidewalk beside the road that runs along the South Side of St John's Harbour, before the crows or rats found it, but not before the flies had: a dead young herring gull.

When I retired, seven years ago, I knew the only thing I would miss was talking with smart young people. I figured I would take opportunities when they arose to do just that. And I do. This week a smart young university student said she wanted to pick my brain about something. Yesterday we sat in one of the downtown parks for an hour or so while she did that. And she took careful notes. But sadly, when I took this picture, I -- less carefully! -- allowed the camera to focus on the background behind her. Duhhh. (I *did* by the way take a second picture and it was in focus.)

Pity the poor cabbage white butterfly. Its lot in life is to lay eggs on the family of Brassica plants, plants that provide us human beings with a dozen delicious edibles, like turnips (and their tops!), cabbages, cauliflowers, and so on. So the cabbage white is widely despised. Pity. Such a pretty thing.

I keep trying to see, and to recognise, bees other than the usual bumblebees and, nowadays, honey bees. Today, in the blackberry flowers, I saw this tiny thing face and eyes into the sweet parts of the flower. Methought, p'raps a bee! And, I am told (on a local Insects page), it is a mining bee. It's tiny: not as long as the width of your little fingernail, maybe seven or eight mm.

An odd word, that: syrphid. It looks like a word related to, say, syrup, perhaps referring to these guys' propensity for getting face and eyes into the sweet parts of flowers. But, no, it comes from the Greek, a word for gnat. Disappointing etymology. I've always been interested in etymology, and entomology too. As a young Linguistics student fifty-odd years ago, I was amused at the half-shelf of books on insects misfiled with books on word origins in our university library.

A Hornet clearwing moth on the chuckleypear in our back yard. They look like gigantic hornets; this one was maybe three cm long, and with a wingspan of about four cm. But they are just moths. Their preferred trees are apparently poplars and our chuckleypears are growing under a bunch of poplars. Maybe this moth was a little confused.

Our blackberry blooms have started, a sign that we may have blackberries in a couple of months.

In the heat yesterday I sat for a couple of hours under the deck, reading in the shade. For ten minutes, this fly came by to visit.

I don't know who the fly is but he's sniffing around the unopened ragwort flowers in our driveway. And, yes, I know that entomologists hate it when non-entomologists call flies bugs.

Every autumn my wife carefully saves the dahlia corms. And in spring she replants them in pots. This year's blooms started opening this morning. Here, the arse-side of the first bloom -- the arse-side because it's facing away from where I can easily get a picture of the not-arse, and it's none the less attractive for it, say I.

I couldn't tell what this was yesterday on our waxball bush -- was it, I wondered, a wasp, a bee, or a hoverfly? I posted it to the local Insects web page and found out it's a honeybee. Duhh. My excuse is that I never saw a honeybee until I was like fifty years old and I still almost never recognise them. Like this time. And, yes, "waxballs" are what you may call snowberry. Or Symphoricarpos alba. The wasps, bees, and hoverflies love their flowers.

I was stopt at a light with this truck's arse ahead of me. I had to take its picture.

A baby tomato, but nonetheless a tomato, started on one of the boxed plants by my kitchen door. I am pleased.

This was not this evening. The moon is fatter tonight. It was three nights ago and I glimpsed the moon just as it was disappearing behind trees and wires up the street from us. A very urban moon.

These, growing in a box outside our kitchen window, suggest to me I will be able to pick some tomatoes later this summer, almost without stepping out of the kitchen.

A bloom in our driveway today. I know: some people call these ox-eyed daisies. But I grew up calling them bachelor's buttons and still do most of the time. They were the prime object of predictive dismemberment routines: "She loves me, she loves me not," etc.

I haven't been outside much for two weeks, sick with the pandemic's viral leftover, the first time for me, and lasting (so far) thirteen days. My wife got off a little easier with only about seven or eight days. Anyway, that confinement has meant I'm looking back at pictures I took before I got so sick. This one of a red admiral (once known as the Red admirable, a name I like better) was actually taken on Day Two of my acquaintance with Covid, but I was still strong enough to wave a camera around. I hope I'll be that strong again soon.