Slim pickings for bugs and blooms! But Comets?
That sudden quiet always gets me…other than an occasional Blue Jay squawking with an acorn in it’s beak or the far away chorus of honking geese it is as if everything has gone to sleep…but there are still a few wiggling things there! We had to stop to let a Northern Water snake cross the road, he was lapping up that last bit of sun before the clouds moved in!
The side of the road terrain destroyer has worked it’s way up and down our small 50km per hour county gravel road. This machine goes along decimating bushes, shrubs, pushing over entire trees, cleaning away swathes of wildflowers. It leaves a horror of destruction behind, just so that YOU, the idiot, who has decided to drive down said road at 100km per hour is safe, and can see around the bends, may you miss the deer that just jumped out at you. I had to jump back off the edge of the road the other day as a woman flew past and then jammed on her breaks by the stop sign. She stopped to check her phone before driving off, I hope she saw my outstretched middle finger jabbed in her direction. ARGHHHH!!!
I was surprised as I walked back from my mail box checking ritual by a butterfly, shocked actually! I stood very still and waited for it to land. Either an Eastern, or Gray Coma butterfly! The few remaining bumblebees are slow, very very slow, clinging to the last few clover blossoms. I found a fly, a variety of Greenbottle Flies (Genus Lucilia) sitting on a yellow flower and a Isabella Tiger Moth caterpillar (Pyrrharctia isabella) calmly was making it’s way alongside the road over the fallen maple leaves.
There are still a few mushrooms poking their way up through the leaves as well. Many of the swampy areas dry up in the Fall and I found a beautiful selection of Robust Clitocybe (?) I think! So hard to ID so many of the mushrooms. The bracket fungus are no longer soft but hard and drying out. I found a Shaggy Legged Ringless Amanita (Amanita rhacopus) Can I get a job naming mushrooms please? Ha! It must be fun!
I just don’t have the heart to pull the mushrooms out, turn them over, to photograph the stem and underside for ID at times, they are just too beautiful to destroy! Or maybe they could be Funeral Bells?! (Galerina marginata) cheerful name that..😳…Galerina marginata, known colloquially as funeral bell, deadly skullcap, autumn skullcap or deadly galerina, is a species of extremely poisonous mushroom-forming fungus in the family Hymenogastraceae of the order Agaricales. It contains the same deadly amatoxins found in the death cap (Amanita phalloides). Ingestion in toxic amounts causes severe liver damage with vomiting, diarrhea, hypothermia, and eventual death if not treated rapidly. So, don’t touch then lick your fingers..0_0!
Sometimes I just love seeing the milkweed seeds blowing out of their casings, drifting with the wind. Makes you want to grab a handful and blow, making a wish! Ha! The reds in the Fall leaves have been few this year along the road. Mostly in the swampy bits. I love seeing the different patterns and colours combinations, maples and oaks, not many flowers but lots of variety in the fallen leaves!
I had a project going on this year, to capture a slice of life on the road in all four seasons. I had to go back to last Fall for the colour as it’s been just golds, yellows and greens in the spot on the road I chose to photograph. I did like how it turned out!
It amazes me how much the Fall colours vary from year to year. It seems we are just getting colour in the maples now, but half the trees along the road are already bare. Was it all the rain early, and the drought later? The quantity and quality of the colour vary depending on weather, sunlight and soil moisture as well as daylength and tree species are key factors that determine the colour of autumn leaves, according to experts. We’ll see what next year brings!
I’ll leave you with another bit of dazzling display from the night sky. Not aurora but Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS). You can find it in the constellation of Virgo, at a distance of 73,712,369.0 kilometers from Earth. Catch it now or wait 80,000 years for it to come by again! Neanderthals’ saw it last;) It’s finally visible to the naked eye! How cool is that?! Saludos amigos!
and where you can see it, compliments of Sky and Telescope!
