Fireflies

Blue jay greed is bottomless.  They took far more than their fair share of bark butter.  A mockingbird posed on the pool railing.  I think it had come for hackberries.

Clouds looked threatening at times and kept the temperature down somewhat.  One of the three monarch chrysalises had a tear that I hope was a sign of the butterfly about to emerge.  I could see faint wing markings inside the chrysalis of the other two. The big carpenter bees got into aerial battles. 

Skinks enjoyed the afternoon heat.  A male goldfinch came for a drink.  I expect the female was incubating eggs.  A brown thrasher hunted in the grass, then went to the trees for berries.  The mockingbird came back.  A female downy woodpecker preferred bark butter.

When I walked down to the dock I surprised a lot of scurrying on the mud but everything quickly disappeared.  Several male amberwings found perches barely above water.  A female jumped on the male I was photographing.  She then dotted the water with eggs which minnows promptly gobbled.  A great blue heron flew past and landed on the dam.

I spotted a mahogany green jumper on a canna leaf.  A couple of Carolina wrens made a fuss over the bark butter.  The sand wasp was back.  I took pity on a monarch caterpillar and moved it to a fresh plant.  In the middle of a zoom meeting I realized there was a male kingfisher on a dock piling.  After the meeting, I went outside in the warm twilight and discovered that there were still plenty of fireflies.  I couldn't see them from indoors.