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The fountain
Jun. 6th, 2013 03:49 pm
Early Meadow-Rue
Jun. 4th, 2013 05:36 pm
I love the leaf wads this species puts up in spring—as if all its leaves have spent the winter balled up in a sock drawer.
Little fuzzy
May. 28th, 2013 04:55 pm
It takes thousands of these baby oak leaves to produce one Elmo doll.
This year's spring has been late and compressed. When the May snows were finally over all the ephemeral wildflowers seemed to go off at once. I took a few obligatory flower shots, but I'm still more interested in buds and half-open leaves on trees. They have an amazing variety of shapes and textures, and since most wildflowers this time of year are white, they're actually more colorful. And I never used to notice them much, so I'm not used to them yet.
I am not good at identifying trees from their buds but I think this one is a maple.
( One more photo )
Racket-Tailed Emerald
Mar. 7th, 2013 04:15 pm
Murphy-Hanrehan Park Reserve is the best place I know of to find Racket-Tailed Emeralds near the Twin Cities. In particular, there is a lovely spot to watch foraging Racket-Taileds in the southeastern part of the park, but the trail to it goes through a low spot between two lakes that like to become one in spring. Luckily the nearby parking lot is also pretty good. On the day I took these pictures, I found 20 or so individuals perching on trees at the edge of the parking lot, but most of them flew away before I could get close. This one ignored me completely; she never moved, even when I got Pamela to bend away a sapling that was making a distracting bright line through the background of this shot. I started to wonder if I was taking pictures of a dead dragonfly. When I was finished and Pamela eased the sapling back into place, a twig brushed a twig on the tree that the emerald was sitting on, and she flew off as if fired from a slingshot.
( One more photo )
