Things with wings

Last night while we waited for a table at a sidewalk restaurant, this European ("Essex") skipper was doing his due reflection.

I was at my little garden plot today in the heat of the day and a constant companion was this four-spot dragonfly. Plus a couple of his friends. They were all darting around finding things in the air to eat, some of which were intent on eating bits of me. So I was glad to have the dragonflies there. And I didn't begrudge them their short rests. I think this is a "four-spot dragonfly," so-named for the black mark on the edge of each of the four wings.

Sitting on the deck after supper drinking our tea, waiting for a downy woodpecker to come a little bit closer, this Tricoloured bumblebee started amusing us. First, he was checking out the Bacopa. But then he turned to the white clover, and that's what he really got face and eyes into. His paniers looked full of pollen by the time he left. Okay: his corbiculae. Or pollen baskets. And, yeah, I know I spelt tricoloured two ways. Those -our spellings have huge variation in Canada. And, willy-nilly, I'm Canadian. And panniers the *very* old-fashioned way. But there you go. You can take a man from his history of English books, but you can't take the history of English from the man.

So says a friend of mine. Pushed, he'll relent and say *these* ones are yellow-hammers, the Yellow finches. They don't hammer much that I've ever seen. But they sure are yellow.

He was parked on the window of our kitchen door so I took advantage to photograph him. He left right away after I got the shot.

That's damsel-fly, not dam-selfy. I'm not that thin.

Yes, chickadee in the chuckleypears. But I like the sound of chuckadee in the chickleypears.

I'm not especially receptive to old folkloric techniques, even despite having made my living as a folklorist for several decades. I'm not that kind of folklorist. But when, the other day, I saw an avalanche of first-hand reports on the efficacy of catching (and killing) fruit flies in one's kitchen by stretching clear plastic wrap over a partly filled glass of apple cider vinegar, and poking tiny holes in the wrap, I thought: "Okay, I'll try it." Now I'm willing to provide another testimonial to its efficacy. Here, for your interest is a photograph of nearly a dozen such flies, most of them dead, one still walking around the inside of the glass. If they can get inside, some will find their way out, so not all are despatched. But it is far more efficient than my hand-clapping and cursing at them. I put the glass on a white screen on my ipad to take this picture. The dust at the bottom, among the fly carcasses, is the precipitate from the vinegar. The picture reminds me of plates my grandmother used to have.

I *think* this is a young, perhaps female, blackpoll warbler. That's what I think today. Last week, I saw maybe the same bird and thought it was a female pine warbler. Who knows what I'll think next week. That's one of our apples in the lower left corner. I'm right proud of it so I didn't crop it out of the picture.

Having eaten a single peanut from my pile, this guy got on top of our garage and proclaimed the news.

They ignored us for a couple of months. Now they are back, loading up on peanuts.

My blow-fly’s eyes are nothing like a fire. Dull amber fills their copious space. Vivacious green its bod entire. Stark hairs from all ‘cept for its pasty face. ---------------------------- Mr Shakespeare might smile at my brave knock-off of #130. He might smile that I'm too lazy to try another ten lines, too.

This summer it's been warmer than usual and the wasps seem to be everywhere. If I had this thing hanging off the hem of my gown, I might be praying too.

Not quite friends but, despite carrying different passports, at least sharing the same sunflower on our deck: a honeybee and a bumblebee.

In the remains of Hurricane Earl, the bluejays that come to our door begging are soaking wet. This afternoon, when I took this picture they'd started to dry out a bit, but they are still pretty wet. This one seems to have suddenly become the King Jay, chasing all the others away from the peanuts, which he's been helping himself to.

Today's sitter in the back-deck studio.

Last winter the chickadees at our feeders planted a small proportion of the sunflower seeds they were given. And being the kind of passive gardeners we are, the sunflowers that sprouted this spring were given their own pots and sunny spots to grow in. Grow they did, and we even let them go to seed. Now the chickadees are picking seeds from the seedy flower heads, from the sunflowers they planted. Smart birds. Nothing prodigal about them. And who's trained whom? They have domesticated us. They are the active gardeners. This picture was just as the sun was going down this afternoon.

Today it was uncommonly warm and humid, and that brought out large numbers of hoverflies and wasps and bees, all searching for a free florid meal. I counted three different hoverfly species. This was one of one of them.