Justfolk's photos

The wahbblers are around this week. This Yellow warbler is hanging out with a Wahbbler Mob running up and down the valley we live in, spending ten minutes here and there in the rain. Most of them are Black-&-white warblers and Yellow-rumped warblers, but there is also this one and what I think is a female Blackpoll warbler. This one posed for me ("This side? this side? my back? yes?") for a couple of minutes in the snowberry next to the deck before it moved along up the valley.

I was looking out the window and this guy was atop a post, thinking that crow-brain about something: where he was going, what the wind was, where the peanuts were, if the rain mattered, or something.

According to some click-baity website I read this morning, Milbert is currently the 432,755th most popular surname in the world. No kidding. I don't know anything about its popularity as a first name. In any case, two hundred years ago the French entomologist Jean-Baptiste Godart had a friend Milbert. Jean-Baptiste named this butterfly for his friend. And the name, Milbert's Tortoiseshell, stuck — despite the competing name “Fire-rim Tortoiseshell” also being out there. Who would have guessed? Here, this morning, Milbert's namesake was feeding, with some flies, on our blooming Astilbe. If you want a flower to attract bees, butterflies and, yes, house flies, plant an Astilbe. This plant is at least twenty years old; it was here when we got the house.

This was the view a few minutes ago, looking south from our deck. From the cover of the little icebox I used in lieu of a tripod, perched on the deck rail. The apple and dogberry trees were lit by stray light from the kitchen. But the Milky Way didn't need any of our light to show off. My camera, the decade-old X100, only does thirty-second exposure easily, so after fifteen seconds I covered the lens. Thus the exif says 30 seconds while it was only fifteen.

For most of the morning and part of the afternoon, this was the view from the back door. Well, not the entire view. I was watching an eagle off to the left of this picture when I took it. He sat there in a tree for about an hour and left when I couldn't see him.

For a while I have been seeing this bird dart around our yard and until today I assumed it was a drab goldfinch. But today I got a clearer view and realised it wasn't a goldfinch at all. And thus I added a bird to the list of those I have seen and identified. It is, I am pretty sure, a yellow-bellied fly-catcher. And it was enjoying the flies in our cherry trees.

Me, I mean. The Unready. Just call me Æthelred. I had the camera in hand this morning as this eagle, whom I had been watching perched in a tree, left his perch and swerved over our deck. But I was unready. I got a few shots but this was the only one not a total smear of movement and poor focus.

A group of about five yellow-rumped warblers came through our back yard today and I think most of them were juveniles. This one, perhaps an adult female, sat for ten minutes at the far end of the clothesline as the others explored the trees and found grubs to eat.

A little window in a lane, labelled jail. But not.

I figured there were about 75 crows outside our back door, in three trees, engaged in pretty spirited conversation. Call-and-response-fashion one would call Cawcawcaw; and the others would not-quite-in-unison respond Caw caw caw caw. Cacaphony indeed. It lasted nearly fifteen minutes. I looked around for a sign of what they were going on about -- a cat or a raven or a hawk -- but saw nothing. I have always preferred the term parliament to the more popular "murder" for a group of crows. But a friend has suggested "caucus" is better still. He may be right.

It was indeed wet for the past two days. But part of the wet look of this bird is the fact that he/she is moulting.

People say Red admiral butterflies are comparatively tame. But that was not my experience with this one. As soon as I stepped in to get a closer look, off he went. But I did get this picture.

On this side of the Atlantic, the Essex skipper butterfly is usually known as the European skipper. This time of year, on a warm afternoon like today's, you can see dozens of them hanging around sunny spots with flowering wild plants. I saw this one with a dozen of its friends or relatives hanging out on vetch, centauria and goldenrod, along with almost as many bumblebees.

When you plant a lot of garlic, if you are lucky, you get a lot of scapes. They keep coming.

My friend's old clivia plant blooms every year for her birthday.

These two have known each other since they were little because their parents were friends. Their parents were friends of mine, too, so I've known each of them most of that time. Or known of them. You know how kids disappear from the view of non-family friends. But now they are old enough to hang out with their parents' friends from time to time.

My trap is working. A friend suggested this looks like a clock. (Time flies, he said.)

Now and again I open a bottle of wine that is part of a little trove of bottles given us a year ago by an older friend who quit drinking and wanted them out of her house. She had stored them well for twenty years or more, and we've continued that care. They won't last much longer -- we keep drinking them! -- so we savour each one. This is what we opened this evening as I was getting ready with supper. It was 25 years old and well served by its years. Mmm-mmm.