Humid

The windows and the bird feeder were sweating.  K hung the clean hummer feeder and hummers soon arrived, including a male!  The regulars were busy on the seed feeder.  An interesting diagram in Scientific American showed revised bird lineages based on DNA. Hummingbirds are most closely related to swifts. 

As the day warmed up, it dried out.  Lots of butterflies were flying, from a hairstreak to a tiger swallowtail.  A green June beetle buzzed me and I thought at first it was a bumblebee.  It settled on a sunflower stem like the one from yesterday which was still there.  A real bumblebee headed for the sunflowers.  A female common whitetail landed on the patio.  A cicada killer buzzed around bot front and back yard too fast for me to capture.  Skinks ventured out cautiously.

A female pondhawk was hanging around the deep end.  Depressions in the dirt around the maple looked like antlions.  Tiny green geometer caterpillars landed on me.  What I believe was a juvenile eagle swooped overhead then passed upstream behind a screen of trees.

The hummer warz really heated up during supper.  Usually one hummer runs off any others that it sees, but tonight an upstart kept trying to intimidate the dominant bird.  It would fly close to the other hummer who was on the feeder and who refused to give ground.  Oh, the drama!  One of them maintained a watch from the dogwood, but I couldn't tell which.