Look what we found crawling up a twig on our dogwood tree this afternoon!
cicada
Author: Barbara Rodgers
anticipation
The folks at the botanical garden are very excited because one of the American Columbos they planted 19 years ago is looking like it might flower this year! This flowering stalk (above), also known as yellow gentian, is about 2 feet tall and it could grow to between 3 and 8 feet tall.
After spending 19 years in our Mountain Habitat as an unassuming rosette of leaves near the ground, one of our American columbos is about to put out a spectacular flowering stalk for the first and only time. Then, after reproducing, it will die.
~ NC Botanical Garden Facebook page
apparently this one not going to be flowering this year
We also enjoyed the presence of other plants and trees, already blooming…
A nice, quiet and cloudy late morning in the garden. We were a couple of hours later than usual and there seemed to be fewer birds out and about.
silent sunday
a snail and another life bird
It was a windy day for a walk but off we went. The very first thing we saw was a snail crossing a side entrance path at the botanical garden. A slow moving creature is so easy to photograph, even if it was partly in its own shadow. And then a little patch of windflowers, how fitting for this windy day.
I keep wondering if this is the same hermit thrush I keep seeing in this same spot, ever since January.
On our way back to the parking lot we passed by the Children’s Wonder Garden and I spotted another life bird! And this one isn’t found in Connecticut, so I had to pencil it into my Birding in Connecticut book, like I did with the Carolina chickadee. I may have to get a different book to keep my life list in.
When the squeaky sound of a rubber ducky drifts down out of the canopy in a southern pine forest, be on the lookout for Brown-headed Nuthatches. These tiny blue-gray songbirds climb up, down, and around pine trunks and branches with the deftness of a rock climber. They cling to bark with their strong feet rather than leaning on their tails like a woodpecker. Brown-headed Nuthatches are social birds that travel in noisy family groups. Sometimes, offspring from previous years help their parents raise young.
~ All About Birds website
Well, we didn’t hear this cute little nuthatch or see him climbing up or down a pine trunk. Nor was he with a noisy family group. He was perched on the back side of the bee hotel, all by himself, feathers getting fluffed up in the wind. Finding him was a treat after a prior frustration.
Earlier on our walk we picked up the call of a white-eyed vireo on our Merlin app. We looked and looked in the trees where the call was coming from but couldn’t see anything. Tim finally resorted to taking random pictures of the tree with his cell phone, hoping to see a bird in one of them when he put them up on his monitor at home. Well, he did see a blurry blob that had the right coloring… But we can’t count it as a life bird — yet — because we didn’t actually see it!
raccoon kits
Tim’s brother and sister-in-law were having a new roof put on their house when the roofers discovered a racoon nest in the pine straw on the old one. A wildlife rehab advised them to put the kits somewhere near where the nest was. So they put them in a small basket and tied it up to a nearby tree. The next day the kits were gone — hopefully mama racoon fetched them and brought them somewhere safe!
photos by Fran
down in the sandhills
Pinehurst, North Carolina
By coincidence, exactly six years ago on this day, my sister-in-law and I visited this lovely horticultural garden near her home. (spring blossoms) We had a great time exploring it again. It was quite different than my local botanical garden. There were lots of huge, vividly colored rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias, and very few identification signs.
We found these in the Hackley Woodland Garden:
We walked the boardwalk in the Desmond Native Wetland Trail, a little nature conservancy and bird sanctuary. It was filled with birdsong and lots of new greenery. Looking up for birds I spotted the only thing blooming in there, a wild azalea. So delicate and pretty:
The Margaret H. Ambrose Japanese Garden was calm and peaceful. We paused a lot, reflecting…
And we finally took a quick peek at the formal Sir Walter Raleigh Garden:
It’s interesting how each garden had a very different mood to it. There were ten other gardens there we didn’t have time to see. I think a lot about the differences between preserved natural land conservancies and cultivated gardens. Each have their value and place in the world.
In the afternoon the four of us took Dan & Fran’s dog Biscuit for a walk in their neighborhood and enjoyed watching the solar eclipse with our special eclipse glasses. They seemed pretty flimsy but worked very well. I had also obtained a special filter for the camera lens. Tim had to hold it in front of the lens while I tried to find the sun without getting it in my eyes. When I fiddled with the zoom it would get fuzzy and we didn’t have a lot of time to figure out what worked best! It was very awkward but we managed to get a few shots.
I almost forgot to check the ground for crescent shadows…
We went back to the house to enjoy a meal and then I took one last peek outside to see the last of the eclipse from the porch. The moon was near the top of the sun and some long leaf pine needles way up in the trees got into the picture, too.
Truly a day to remember!
hunting for cinnamon fern
North Carolina Botanical Garden
It was spring vacation week so we had a chance to take Katherine with us on one of our walks at the botanical garden. Like her grandmother, she was enchanted by the rose arbor. And we finally saw tadpoles in the frog pond!
And of course we saw lots of flowers…
Katherine knows a lot about cinnamon ferns and she located some starting to come up in the Mountain Habitat (above). And then, in the Coastal Plain Habitat (below) she spotted some more that were taller and starting to unfurl. My granddaughter informed me that, among other things, cinnamon fern is the oldest species of fern on earth. (70 million years!)
(photo by Tim)
Of course there were some birds to enjoy and a couple even paused for a photo or two…
he was feeding her but I couldn’t capture it!
What a blessing it was to share a beautiful day with our granddaughter, to share our interests with her and to have her share hers with us.
bluets in the woods
On the last day of March the temperature got up into 80s and the sunshine was abundant. It was the perfect setting for my first walk of the year without wearing even a jacket. Two friends came by and the three of us headed down to the neighborhood creek for a little adventure.
Two days earlier Tim & I had explored a bit and found a few bluets making a tentative appearance. What a difference two days made! There were bluets everywhere, clump after clump at every turn on the path. And the leaves on the trees were starting to leaf out in earnest.
As we wandered up the path following the creek we soon encountered a challenge, a steep bank on one side of the path and the swiftly flowing creek on the other. And the narrow path became a stretch of jagged rocks. There was a discussion about how or if we should continue and then, one friend took the lead and proceeded, saying, “we can do this!” And so we followed, hugging the hill, practically crawling, grabbing saplings and roots for support.
When we finally got past the steep bank and had a flat place to stand my adrenaline was pumping and I was shaking like a leaf. But I turned around, and took a picture (above) of the route we had taken. We had started down near where that tree is lying across the water so some of the “path” we took was behind the curve…
Our reward was a chance to walk around on some flat land and enjoy seeing more spring flowers. We saw some stairs leading up to a neighborhood and decided that would be our way home, and we saw a little bridge over the creek, too. So we crossed over and walked some more. There are so many paths in this forest!
There were birds singing everywhere, but they were hard to spot. I probably wouldn’t have included the following blurry pictures but I had to share my newest life bird! Although I’ve heard phoebes calling before it was a delight to actually see one!
One of our most familiar eastern flycatchers, the Eastern Phoebe’s raspy “phoebe” call is a frequent sound around yards and farms in spring and summer. These brown-and-white songbirds sit upright and wag their tails from prominent, low perches. They typically place their mud-and-grass nests in protected nooks on bridges, barns, and houses, which adds to the species’ familiarity to humans. Hardy birds, Eastern Phoebes winter farther north than most other flycatchers and are one of the earliest returning migrants in spring.
~ All About Birds website
Retracing our steps to the bridge I was able to get a nice picture of it (above) from a little bank elevation. After crossing the bridge we climbed the stairs up to the road and walked home through the neighborhood. Tired and thirsty, but feeling wonderful!
the intelligence of a place
North Carolina Botanical Garden
It’s always a pleasure to be greeted by the roses dangling from their arbor each time we visit the botanical garden. It never gets old! Like sunrises and sunsets, I suppose. A steady presence. But we were on a new mission this day to locate a Virginia dwarf trillium, another tiny ephemeral we heard was blooming. Along the way we saw…
This (below) was the only undamaged dwarf trillium we could find, surrounded by other kinds of plants. We had torrential rains for a couple of days and I think they did a number on the tiny trilliums. But I’m grateful we got a chance to see this one. It is much smaller than all the other regular size trilliums we’ve been seeing this spring.
Only by living for many moons in one region, my peripheral senses tracking seasonal changes in the local plants while the scents of the soil steadily seep in through my pores — only over time can the intelligence of a place lay claim upon my person. Slowly, as the seasonal round repeats itself again and again, the lilt and melody of the local songbirds becomes an expectation within my ears, and so the mind I’ve carried within me settles into the wider mind that enfolds me.
~ David Abram
(Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology)
what a mess he made discarding the “helicopters”
(thanks to Eliza for the identification)
As we were making our way back to the parking lot this giant bee (above) was hovering over the walkway, blocking our path. Well, if it was just going to stay there I might as well get a picture of it. I don’t know if these creatures are unique to this area but sometimes they hover outside our windows and crash into them repeatedly. It sounds like someone is throwing pebbles at the window.
So we’ve lived here for ten moons I think, not very many so far, but our senses are slowly getting familiar with the seasonal changes.