Nature – Page 5 – Gardens For Goldens

At 10PM, it is still sweltering. The air thick and stifling. Our beloved Delta Breeze has abandoned us. Nothing moves unless it has to. These are the dog days of summer. The sunflower droops,

The Dahlia says “these puny petals are all that I can muster.”

The bees do their work as early as possible in the day,

And everyone would rather perch than fly.

But give a dog a little pool,

Or puppies a spray of water,

And somehow they find a way.

A few more days of century-plus weather.

Nothing to do but wait it out – and pine for it next winter.

“The magic fades too fast
the scent of summer never lasts…”
― Sanober Khan

Wordless Wednesday: Stick the Landing

Wordless Wednesday: Angel Trumpet

Wordless Wednesday: Swallowtail

The Red Admiral

The Red Admiral Butterfly (Vanessa atalanta) is supposed to be quite common in our area,

yet, I don’t ever recall seeing one in my garden before.

I guess the Butterfly Bush was just too tempting!

What’s mine is yours little friend. Come back and visit soon.

Wordless Wednesday: Send in the Clowns

With the Sierras above us still capped with El Nino’s snowfall, the rice growers have flooded and planted most of their fields this year – turning Homeward Bound into lakefront property for a few months. The more than 500,000 acres of the valley’s rice lands are located along the Pacific Flyway, and the flooded fields provide critical migration corridors for shoreline birds and others.

Looking out from the garden, I saw this long dark line of what looked like turkeys pecking at the marshy field.

Sadly, I did not have my long lens (naturally!), but I could get close enough to ID them as White-faced Ibis – a bird I had not seen in the fields before.

Apparently, their numbers declined dangerously in the 60’s and 70’s due to DDT contamination and habitat destruction. The inland population has rebounded somewhat in the past few decades, but the pesticides used in rice farming are still a concern.

These dark birds with their long bills and metallic coloring wade through the fields picking their way through shallow waters looking for a meal: invertebrates, crustaceans, frogs, and fishes.