Gloomy

A fledgling male cardinal showed up at lunch.  His parents were no longer supporting him. A mockingbird was lurking around too.

Something up in the trees got the blue jays going again, and other birds joined the mob.  A honeybee explored a camellia.  Mockingbirds returned for beauty berries but the light was bad.  Blue jays tried to chase them off. 

A sprinkle of rain fell in defiance of the meteorologists.  An owl hooted after dark.  It sounded more like this than like the other possibilities.

Summery

A great blue heron, a cloudless sulphur and a dragonfly got away without a photo. Crickets and beetles rafted on the water.  I hauled spiders out, including a mama wolf and a bold jumper.  Also there were sliverfish or firebrats,order Zygentoma, in the water.  Out in the creek I spied another jellyfish. 

A wasp investigated one of the patio chairs which offered it no wood.  A venusta orchard spider hung from an enormous, flat web over in the trees.  The one by the azalea was gone leaving me to wonder if it was the same spider. 

Something upset the blue jays, I suspect it was a predatory bird.  Mockingbirds sneaked into the beauty berries.  The regulars and titmice rounded out the bird count. 

Wisps of cirrus clouds moved East while  below them fluffy cumulus slid past on a Northeast trajectory. At one point, the ice crystals that form cirrus clouds were in the right spot to intercept sunlight and refract it into a rainbow, or rather an ice-bow.  I noticed a sundog earlier. 

Then the sky cleared at sunset except for clouds on the horizon that turned gold.  Later, the just-past full moon rose, looking large and illuminating the ground. 

Warm, indeed!

It was a beautiful day, but I had promises to keep.  At breakfast, several titmice joined chickadees for sunflower seeds.  Meanwhile a blue jay ate mealworms but dodged the photography fee.  A titmouse played nuthatch on the pine trunk. 

I went out and added mealworms to the dish but the blue jay never returned.  After I'd come back to breakfast, I felt a tickle on my leg. I shook it a little and suddenly there was a sizable mama wolf spider on the floor.  I was able to gently shoo her outside, not just for humanitarian reasons, but to make sure all her babies went with her. 

The full moon rose through thin cloud streaks that added interest.  A bright green treehopper was attracted to the window, along with midges and small moths. 

Warming, I hope

A house wren and then a Carolina wren poked around in the morning.  Here are both for comparison.

Only one titmouse visited.  Parents and a juvenile cardinal showed up but the male kept driving the fledgling away. The water was quite cold, or was it that the air was warmer?  At any rate, I found a spider and a frog in the skimmer, both lively.  Lots of ground beetles both alive and dead were in the water and there were several earthworms on the bottom.

A vine tied together two flowering stalks of goldenrod.  The saltbush was also blooming and the marsh fleabane was still pink.

S-s-s-snake!

The morning creek was bright and glassy but the breeze soon roughened the surface.  A brown thrasher was visible at breakfast.  It went for beauty berries and there was not yet enough light to photograph that area.

A cobweb spider in the window had her egg sack hatch.  I would have expected the spiders to winter over as eggs.  There were slug tracks across a sheet web in the cinquefoil on the North side of my office.  Three goldenrod stalks were blooming.  As the yard has gotten more shady, just a few stalks survived.  The marsh fleabane appeared to be doing well.  The hackberry grew galls instead of berries.  Some sort of predatory bug stalked something up in the hackberry leaves.

As we finished lunch, a black rat snake appeared below the bird feeders.  It slipped across the steps and through the mulch and disappeared somewhere behind the sakaki.  It was able to raise its head about six inches to take a good look at where it planned to go.

Blue sky

The sun shone and the wind gentled, but it was still chilly. The Argiope disappeared, leaving its web intact and a well-protected egg sack nearby.  The orchard spider was undisturbed.  Birds were elusive except the seed eaters like titmice.  Squirrels looked liked zombies with their skin showing in patches around the warbles. 

I rescued a couple of caterpillars, though perhaps I shouldn't have left them free to eat my plants.  One was all white and fuzzy and I thought it was drowned till it moved.  My best guess was Virginian tiger moth, AKA yellow woolly-bear, but that's not certain.   The other caterpillar was something I've seen before, much smaller and velvety black. I also saved a ground beetle. 

A large jellyfish was slowly pulsating between the two posts beside the dock.  The stinkhorn fungi all dried up. I saw a dragonfly and a butterfly in the Central Library parking lot but didn't get an ID on either. 

Still cool

A North wind and lots of passing clouds restrained the sunshine.  I didn't see anything till mid afternoon, but then birds began to show up.  Mockingbirds were torn between the dogwood berries and the beauty berries.  A white breasted nuthatch darted in for sunflower seeds, and I struggled with a camera that didn't want to change focus. 

A rafting spider tried to climb the pool wall but lost its grip and had to walk on water.  A grasshopper also rafted on a larger leaf.  An American lady stayed on dry land, mulch actually.  According to Mary Reid Barrow, painted lady butterflies migrate now, but American ladies don't migrate.   Squirrels were at the hideous, painful-looking stage of warbles.

The mockingbirds appeared to be juveniles.  In the late afternoon, they had a run-in with the blue jays over the beauty berries.  Unfortunately, that corner of the yard gets dark first as the sun drops behind the trees.  I got one lucky shot of the chasing back and forth.

Finches were back with the cardinals, chickadees, and titmice.  A female downy woodpecker joined them.  A Carolina wren foraged under the rosemary.  The clouds that had previously blocked the sun's warmth turned creamy at sunset.