Nature Notes: Hitchhiker

Sometimes nature decides to come inside. In this case a little moth or butterfly flew inside my car.



I was getting my mail from the box at the bottom of my driveway, and while the car window was down a flash of color flew by my face.



When I spotted the hitchhiker, I rolled up the car window and grabbed my camera. I felt a little guilty about taking photographs before I let him leave. However, as soon as I finished and rolled the window back down he was able to fly back and feast on the lantana by my mailbox.



He'll probably be more careful about hitchhiking next time.

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Today's Flowers: Coneflower seeds attracting goldfinches

I took these shots yesterday at the park but when the flash of yellow zoomed in I knew what it was because this phenomenon is happening at my garden too.



This time of year when the purple coneflower (echanasia) and blackeyed susan (rudbeckia) go to seed the goldfinch descend for a feast.



It can be confusing because from a distance the goldfinch look like the flowers and aren't much bigger than the flowers.



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Photohunters: Low

At first when I saw that the theme this week was low, I was stumped. I didn't want to post pictures of people that looked depressed or low in that sense of the word.


Then it occurred to me that these shots I took, as we were arriving in the mountains last Friday, while the sun was setting appear to have low clouds. My daughter was driving so I was free to take pictures.

I don't know if the clouds really are low or if it's the perspective but either way I figure this will do for the theme, although perhaps it's a stretch. For the home of photohunters, you can click the button below.

Nature Notes: Moses Cone Memorial Park

Last weekend I was in Boone and Blowing Rock, NC for a family reunion. One thing I noticed was how green everything was. A year ago during this same time of year I was in a similar area of the NC mountains and the statewide drought we had for about a year had taken its toll.



I took the shots in this post at the Moses H. Cone Memorial Park and it was nice to see how well the plants are doing. During the drought even the rhododendrun were dying but there is no sign of any of that now.



There were quite a few people riding horses on the trails from the manor house to bass lake. However, none were riding around the lake like last time I was there because there were signs saying no horses on that part of the trail. I hyphothesized about whether they decided to change that policy to avoid all the dung on the lake part of the trail. Dung is definitely a part of nature and can be beneficial when broken down for compost.



I suppose I'll stop here. If I'm going to start talking about dung in my nature notes, perhaps I don't need to continue. This might get too earthy.

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Lions, and Tigers, and technical problems

I am back home after a pleasant long weekend in the North Carolina mountains for a family reunion. Unfortunately, my computer won't boot so I'm making do with my old, and very slow computer. I did manage to put my camera software on my old computer but it was so slow downloading photographs that sorting is problematic. I don't know how much blogging I'll be able to do until my computer issues are straight but I thought I'd post one shot on each of my blogs for now.