Things with wings

This tiny thing and a, uhh, colleague were hanging out on the leaves of our dahlia this evening. I have no real idea what they are but I suspect fruit flies. In case you're interested in how big he was: about 2mm from nose to arse end, the wings adding another mm or so. I will now return to considering the air blowing from my fan.

I came out the basement door and saw this, a White admiral butterfly sunning himself. Luckily I had the camera, but he didn't stay long enough for me to get a closer picture.

Over half a century ago, I was a teenager and I started to learn the names of the local butterflies. I had a poor ability for carrying what I learnt from summer to summer since I was cramming my brain with all manner of other things in between. Eventually i forgot almost all of them. And, thus, in my retirement, my dotage, I've been trying again to learn them. I was sitting in the somewhat cool shade underneath our deck this afternoon when this fellow landed nearby. It may be the most common one in our backyard. I call it the Yellow swallowtail but I know (now) that it is officially something like the Canadian tiger swallowtail. Or so I think anyway.

Another butterfly in our backyard. While our supper was cooking, this Cabbage White settled on the waxball bush catching the low sun. (I call it waxball; some call it snowberry. You may know it as Symphoricarpos albus. You got to call it sumpin'. [Sing that like Bob.]) If the poor Cabbage White had a better name, it'd probably be one of our most appreciated butterflies. The name refers to its (granted: bad) habit of laying eggs on Brassicas and thus gobbling up what we want to eat. But it's still pretty.

My trap is working. A friend suggested this looks like a clock. (Time flies, he said.)

On this side of the Atlantic, the Essex skipper butterfly is usually known as the European skipper. This time of year, on a warm afternoon like today's, you can see dozens of them hanging around sunny spots with flowering wild plants. I saw this one with a dozen of its friends or relatives hanging out on vetch, centauria and goldenrod, along with almost as many bumblebees.

People say Red admiral butterflies are comparatively tame. But that was not my experience with this one. As soon as I stepped in to get a closer look, off he went. But I did get this picture.

It was indeed wet for the past two days. But part of the wet look of this bird is the fact that he/she is moulting.

I figured there were about 75 crows outside our back door, in three trees, engaged in pretty spirited conversation. Call-and-response-fashion one would call Cawcawcaw; and the others would not-quite-in-unison respond Caw caw caw caw. Cacaphony indeed. It lasted nearly fifteen minutes. I looked around for a sign of what they were going on about -- a cat or a raven or a hawk -- but saw nothing. I have always preferred the term parliament to the more popular "murder" for a group of crows. But a friend has suggested "caucus" is better still. He may be right.

A group of about five yellow-rumped warblers came through our back yard today and I think most of them were juveniles. This one, perhaps an adult female, sat for ten minutes at the far end of the clothesline as the others explored the trees and found grubs to eat.

Me, I mean. The Unready. Just call me Æthelred. I had the camera in hand this morning as this eagle, whom I had been watching perched in a tree, left his perch and swerved over our deck. But I was unready. I got a few shots but this was the only one not a total smear of movement and poor focus.

For a while I have been seeing this bird dart around our yard and until today I assumed it was a drab goldfinch. But today I got a clearer view and realised it wasn't a goldfinch at all. And thus I added a bird to the list of those I have seen and identified. It is, I am pretty sure, a yellow-bellied fly-catcher. And it was enjoying the flies in our cherry trees.

According to some click-baity website I read this morning, Milbert is currently the 432,755th most popular surname in the world. No kidding. I don't know anything about its popularity as a first name. In any case, two hundred years ago the French entomologist Jean-Baptiste Godart had a friend Milbert. Jean-Baptiste named this butterfly for his friend. And the name, Milbert's Tortoiseshell, stuck — despite the competing name “Fire-rim Tortoiseshell” also being out there. Who would have guessed? Here, this morning, Milbert's namesake was feeding, with some flies, on our blooming Astilbe. If you want a flower to attract bees, butterflies and, yes, house flies, plant an Astilbe. This plant is at least twenty years old; it was here when we got the house.

I was looking out the window and this guy was atop a post, thinking that crow-brain about something: where he was going, what the wind was, where the peanuts were, if the rain mattered, or something.

The wahbblers are around this week. This Yellow warbler is hanging out with a Wahbbler Mob running up and down the valley we live in, spending ten minutes here and there in the rain. Most of them are Black-&-white warblers and Yellow-rumped warblers, but there is also this one and what I think is a female Blackpoll warbler. This one posed for me ("This side? this side? my back? yes?") for a couple of minutes in the snowberry next to the deck before it moved along up the valley.

When my wife gave me a couple of books about warblers late last year I said to her something along the lines of "I hope I see an American redstart." I had never seen one, but each summer we get a motley band of warblers in our neighbourhood, so there was a good chance. And yesterday this one showed up with the other warblers. Not the dazzling show-off the adult males are, but a redstart nonetheless. I don't know if it's a female adult or a juvenile. (Apparently the young birds all look like the adult females.) I've been counting the bird species seen from our back door. this is Number Forty-Five.

Today it is dry, after some real deluges in the past few days, but we're getting the northerly flow of one or another of those large weather systems in the Atlantic. So it's just ten degrees, a little cold for most flying insects, including this White underwing moth. He perched this morning on the pulley of our clothesline and he's been there for five or six hours, so far.

He's happy to hang out with us as long as we feed him when he calls. And he's happy to wait off to the side for the crows or even the flicker -- they get first dibs on the peanuts if they want it. But he brooks no competition from the juncos and they don't ask questions, just shuffle off to the side themselves.