It seemed this mushroom wanted to be a sunflower — so happy and sunny on a bright sunny morn. ☙
Image #53 – The Sunflower Mushroom
Image #52 – The Pipes Are Calling
It is July 20th. Forty-three years ago the first men landed on the moon and it is the birth date of my dear friend Barbra Jenks. She would have been 47-years old today but AIDS took her life in 1992. She has been dead for more than twenty years. It is nearly impossible to believe.
Here in North Carolina, on Fawn Hill, in 2013, life goes on and the Indian Pipes are beginning to fade. They seem to be sprouting up everywhere on the hill around me but the earliest blooms are definitely on the down-side of growth and I have my doubts about whether the new growth will be able to match the growth spurts of the other stands. The signs of de-comp in the older stands are there in blackness that tinges the petals and the mushy texture of the stalks. Still, they are clearly producing nectar as the honey bee showed me.
He buzzed by my ear as I lay on the soft bed of leaves in the woods trying to get “just the right shot” on the Indian Pipes. Soon I was engaged in an energetic effort to get a clear photo of this bee who worked the petals with remarkable familiarity. I couldn’t do it. He was too fast for me. I have some wonderfully focused pictures of his rear-end as he nuzzled into each petal but this grainy photo is the best I can do for a full frontal of this wonderful bee.
Life goes on. This bee knows nothing of men landing on the moon or Barbra’s untimely death. His life is short and his focus intense. There is a lesson there for all of us. ☙
Image #49 – Brown Thrasher
The sun comes up early in Franklin, fifteen minutes earlier than it does in my recent home of Sarasota. I don’t make it a point to see the sunrise unless my bio-rhythms call me out of bed for some reason or if I am in a unique place that almost demands a viewing, like India or the east coast of New Zealand. Yesterday I was awoken in the early twilight of sunrise by an odd, rhythmic clicking sound. It was so regular that it almost seemed like a machine. I was curious, so was the cat. We both pulled ourselves from sleep and went to the window. There was a Brown Thrasher, aggressively “working” the piles of leaves in my backyard, flicking them about and grabbing morsels of insects, grubs and worms that were still slow-moving in the coolness of the early day. Is his clicking (also described as a “smacking”) some kind of sonar? He “worked” my yard for most of the morning. This photo was taken more than three hours later. He seemed very well fed and content. There’s a lot of that on Fawn Hill. ☙
Image #48 – My View — edited
A rather truncated view of my porch view, thanks to the Nikon 18-200mm lens. The power lines are a giveaway but when you can zoom-in it removes a lot of “unwanted” image. In this case the missing element is the small business that operates just below my home. They manufacture bee-hives and many other things, I’m sure. They also run a survey company and probably did the survey on this land that I now occupy. At night their security light is very obvious and I dream of a Japanese Maple that will help block that light. But it all seems so miniscule in the scheme of things. After all, they make bee-hives and have two stands of hives, each about 10 feet in length. In other words, LOTS of bees. I see the bees as I go about my day and wish I had more to offer them. “Give me another year” I plead. Wasted time and thought. For bees the only time is now. They have this moment and no other. Still, I make my promises.
Yesterday I put up my hummingbird feeder, filled with a nectar that I now feel is too weak. Nevertheless they came, this morning as I was sitting on my porch and enjoying coffee. Two of them sat in the nearby tree for quite a while, conversing in that mysterious way that birds do. They flew away and I assumed that my decade-old hummingbird feeder, the one that never worked in Sarasota, was just too old and faded. But wait! One of them came back and tested each of the feeding ports. After he (?) departed I rushed to get my camera and hoped to post a picture of hummingbird at my feeder. Alas, faithful readers must endure a truncated version of my view. But I am confident that one day soon there will be a hummingbird picture. And, if not, I will share the purple mushrooms that are about 1/4 of an inch and look like coral. This is a marvelous new world I have entered. Alice’s WanderLand goes on … I am such a lucky soul. ☙
Image #43 – Indian Pipe close-up
Image #41 was a grainy, iPhoto picture of a wonderful cluster of Indian Pipes. I returned the next day and was amazed to find the bloom intact. Even more wonderfully, there were small clusters just beginning to emerge from the forest floor. This photo is a close-up of the plant’s flower, so delicate and bell-like. Being able to photograph this flower is such a treat for me. Watch for more photos. ☙
Image #42 – These are the voyages of the Starship …
After photographing the Indian Pipes last night I started home and caught sight of a majestic tree fungus/lichen. I snapped a couple of pictures with the iPhone which were adequate but we returned this morning and photographed both the Indian Pipes and fungus/lichen (pictured above) with the Nikon. It was a good session and I will post more in coming days.
This magnificent being is growing on the side of a tree and is stunning in its color against the dark backdrop of the forest. My field guides are still packed in a box, enroute on a moving truck so I can’t begin to tell you what this is but my imagination sees the Starship Enterprise. What about yours?☙
Image #40 – Shelter from the Storm
Things are moving along at Fawn Hill. There are now two bird feeders up and the birds have definitely found them. They are grateful for a dry place to feed — as this blurry photo through a window shows. There is a wonderful variety of birds here, quite a treat for this Florida gal who is accustomed to cardinals, blue jays, the occasional wren and not much else at her Florida feeder. For years I have known that in Sarasota I was just a bit too far south for the variety of birds that flock to Florida in the winter. The more colorful ones — the finches, orioles, grosbeaks and buntings — stay in the Ocala area. Sarasota does have great water birds and Myakka River State Park always provided a smorgsboard of water fowl.
It has rained here for days. I’ve been told this is a rainforest and my brief — two week — experience would confirm that. When I stand on my front porch I can hear the nearby Potts Branch — a minor tributary of the Little Tennessee River — as it races down from the hills. It provides the name for the road that accesses my house on Fawn Hill. My friend Boni tells me that in times of drought you can use the creek bed as a hiking trail but that certainly is not the case this year. The rushing of the water is somehow soothing, even though I know it is wreaking havoc as it gains momentum and slams into the Little Tennessee. In downtown Franklin there is a 3-4 mile walkway along the Little Tennessee. Tango and I walked a bit of it yesterday and it is significantly higher than it was a week ago.
So much to learn in this new place.☙
Image #31
Normally we think of mushrooms in soft, mossy forests. But fecundity rules — especially in the summer and these mushrooms are making a bold stand in a seemingly unforgiving landscape. Good luck to them! ☙
Image #29
The super moon of 2013 occurred this past weekend. I was able to grab some photos of the event from the front yard of my new home in Franklin, NC. Arriving on June 21, the summer solstice, the “Super Moon” happened the next night and, as you can see, we had nice clear skies.
Pulling up stakes and moving on is always daunting. I can recall a period during my college years when I moved every six months but I was in my twenties then and what I owned fit in a VW beetle. At worse I was faced with two trips in the VW. Today, at 65, things are quite a bit different. The move did give me the opportunity to “lighten the load” but there is still a very sizeable quantity of “stuff” on its way to NC.
I won’t bore you with another essay on “stuff.” Rather I will cut to the chase — moving is scary business. As a species we seem to abhor change which is ironic because life is nothing but change. This move came about in fits and starts and as I sit here in a relatively empty double-wide trailer, on the side of a hill in a town I can barely find the center of, I will readily admit to wondering what in the world am I doing here? The answer is simple. I am living my life and a part of me has always wanted to live in these hills and enjoy their wonders. Life presented me with a chance to do that and I have seized the moment. It pleases me that things seemed to conspire so that my arrival was on the solstice and that the universe presented such a wonderful show on my second night in my new home. Where will the next solstice find me? ☙
Daily Image #26
Struttin’ their stuff.
Alice's WanderLand 