Equinox

The wind blew the clouds away for breakfast but the blue didn't last.  Cardinals and chickadees visited the feeder.  The mother cardinal has stopped feeding the juvenile male, but he still cried for food as he fed himself.  A pair of flickers ate dogwood berries for a short while.  The tail of the female is in the upper left. 

As I was coming in at noon, I saw a mockingbird on K's car.  It showed up in the back yard briefly as well.  A female downy woodpecker appeared at lunchtime.  The wind blew occasional gaps in the clouds but the sun didn't last long enough to counteract the wind chill.  A pair of doves napped on a branch of the oak.  Wasps hunkered low to avoid the gusts.  I thought I glimpsed a dragonfly in the front yard. 

A couple of cormorants dried out on perches above the creek.  The across-the-creek neighbor with the pink bench added a verdigrised heron that kept distracting me.  There were lots of feathers floating on the water.  I heard lots of birds I either couldn't find or else were silhouetted against the sky while I got quite chilled out on the dock.  The saltmarsh fleabane appeared to be nearly done flowering.  It spread from last year!

After dark, the waxing gibbous moon was mostly visible behind the clouds still blowing across the sky.  The wind seemed to be a bit gentler, at lest the moonflowers weren't being shredded.  The tree crickets were in full cry.