Oh, the noise!

The Argiope's web was twisted by the rain overnight.  A bluebird came early for the party mix in the dish feeders and a brown headed nuthatch came for seeds.  The nuthatch ran into a territorial finch but it persisted and eventually got breakfast.  Later a Carolina wren wanted suet.  Titmice also got seeds.  A goldfinch just wanted a drink. 

A monarch butterfly found the butterfly milkweed.  I got just a glimpse of a tiger swallowtail and maybe another butterfly, and of course duskywing skippers.  Dragonflies were plentiful.  A female great blue skimmer, a blue dasher, and a widow skimmer used perches.  Cruising overhead were a prince baskettail and a saddlebags.  Honeybees, bumblebees, carpenter bees, leafcutter bees and those megachili bees with the furry pantaloons converged on the mountain mint along with wasps. 

I fished a centipede out of the water but ants decided it was a corpse.  A horntail was luckier and revived.  It stuck its horn up in the air like a dragonfly obelisking but it certainly wasn't too warm, so maybe that was a way to get rid of water.  iNaturalist said it's an Asian horntail Eriotremex formosanus.  Several brown scarab beetles and a bumblebee also got a reprieve from a watery grave.  After swimming with the bugs, I picked blueberries.  A couple of small organisms flew across the yard too fast for identification.  My first guess was hummers, but they could have been large insects.  A bluebird hid in the dogwood.  

A little before 9pm, I went outside to see if there were any visible sparkles from all the booming and banging.  Only a flicker showed through the trees occasionally.  So I watched the fireflies and pretended they were the sparks.  The moon was past first quarter and overhead, but blurred by haze.  When I came inside, I noticed a longhorn beetle (I think) on the window by the camellia.