Lowell's verses tend to pop into my head around this time of year, a legacy of my mother. Nevertheless, this was a lovely day with an intensely blue sky. Too bad I missed the whole morning, except for seeing a skink outside of the medical building and finding an earwig in my coat after two hours in the waiting room. But the afternoon made up for it, beginning with blue jays. At least three were raiding the bark butter balls except one still could not manage it. A squirrel watched the commotion with a very doubtful eye. Bluebirds soon arrived.
A pile of oak branches with dried but not yet brown leaves were a clue that a squirrel's drey overhead had not been well engineered. Honeybees, carpenter bees, and paper wasps were still nectaring on the rue. Little gray Megachile rotundata leafcutter bees were loving the lavender. So was a bumblebee with huge orange pollen bags. Another very yellow bumblebee looked like a golden snitch.
Soldier beetles preferred the parsley as a sort of singles bar. Because it's still Spring, they were probably margined leatherwings, Chauliognathus marginatus. Later in the year the goldenrod soldier beetle takes over. And that, at last, solves the mystery of the little velvety black "caterpillars" I see every summer. No wonder I couldn't find a beetle larva in a butterfly book. I located the orange inchworm again, but my focus was off and the battery died just then.
The coral honeysuckle was blooming again. I wonder if the hummer found it? The white breasted nuthatch returned but I think I made it nervous. I spotted a wren but the camera couldn't get the focus. A skink ventured out onto the patio when a little cloud cast some shade.
The waxing gibbous moon was very bright but it has a hazy halo.
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