Spring comes in various ways...birds have started singing their mating songs, and plants have begun to sprout (the wild garlic) and even break buds.
Elbowbush is the first shrub to flower every year, but not all of them go at once. Some still show no swelling of the buds. Others show swollen buds with dark red "shells" just covering the developing flowers.	A few yards down the fence from that one (and with some un-budded plants in between), another elbowbush is just opening a few of its tiny flowers--this one shows green, not the yellow of the more mature flower.
And down the fencerow from that one, the first to open fully is already clothed in fuzzy gold...there's a reason they call it "spring herald." I heard a faint buzzing, but found no bees. Instead....
Dozens of iridescent blue/green flies sucked nectar from the tiny flowers. As they moved about, their color seemed to change from electric blue to deep turquoise.
From beauty to the ridiculous....from Owl Pavilion, looking down our neighbor's fenceline, we saw big black birds in a snag. The sky had clouded to a milky, almost glaring, gray, and the birds were both distant and silhouetted against the afternoon sky--not a great location for photographs. They were the size of black vultures, and that's what I thought it was. At first glance, it looked like two birds--one holding its wings out a little, perhaps to catch the sun. An odd angle--usually vultures sunning hold their wings all the way out, but who knows, with birds.
The bird turned its head and gaped...from a distance, it looked like it was gasping for air. Odd..."Grandma, what a big mouth you have..."	And it turned its head back, suddenly resembling a duck...a very odd duck...
Wait--a TWO-headed vulture? No--it can't be--it must be two vultures! Side by side, by facing different ways...something I could've told easily if the birds had been nearer, or if they had been down-sun instead of silhouetted against that pearly bright sky.
The vultures, tired of being stared at by the giant eye of Bird One, shifted about, flapped wings a little, and finally took off. this is just one of them; I lightened the shot enough that you can just see the paler patches near the wingtips. Black vultures indeed. I think, by the way, it was a pair and a hanger-on, from some of the behavior seen but not photographed.
And now for something more scenic...our rustic bridge over the creek. By this time the clouds had thickened and it was a lot darker (also, in the woods it's always darker) so this took some remedial work to make it visible.	Upstream from the footbridge, around a bend, the next reach of water. This also required work in the computer.
On a clearer day, a different area of the creek--needing no work in the computer to show its beauty.

Back to Archive