The weather has gone down hill; morning and evening fog usually arriving with the incoming tide, drizzle, fog mist, cool then muggy and steady rain.

As I expected the Eastern Bluebird and Tree Swallow chicks have fledged. They move around with their parents, protective parents, and are difficult to photograph as they sit on wires almost always backlit.

We can smell the wild fires and the sky has a errie cast with the sun occasionally poking through the fire haze. What have we done to this planet?

Eastern Bluebird

There are no more mouth fulls of grubs and insects.

Eastern Bluebird 190 Eastern Bluebird 191 Eastern Bluebird 192 Eastern Bluebird 193

Fritillary Buttterfly on Thistle

Thistle

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigation Jump to search

For other uses, see Thistle (disambiguation).

Not to be confused with Teasel, also a tall prickly plant.

Thistle is the common name of a group of flowering plants characterised by leaves with sharp prickles on the margins, mostly in the family Asteraceae. Prickles can also occur all over the plant – on the stem and on the flat parts of the leaves. These prickles are an adaptation that protects the plant from being eaten by herbivores. Typically, an involucre with a clasping shape similar to a cup or urn subtends each of a thistle's flowerheads.

The comparative amount of spininess varies dramatically by species. For example, Cirsium heterophyllum has minimal spininess while Cirsium spinosissimum is the opposite.^[1] Typically, species adapted to dry environments have greater spininess.

The term thistle is sometimes taken to mean precisely those plants in the tribe Cardueae (synonym: Cynareae),^[2] especially the genera Carduus, Cirsium, and Onopordum.^[3] However, plants outside this tribe are sometimes called thistles, and when this is done, "thistles" would form a polyphyletic group.

A thistle is the floral emblem of Scotland and Lorraine, as well as the emblem of the Encyclopædia Britannica.

Biennial thistles are particularly noteworthy for their high wildlife value, producing such things as copious floral resources for pollinators, nourishing seeds for birds like the goldfinch, foliage for butterfly larvae, and down for the lining of birds' nests

Fritillary and Canada Thistle 190

Grey Catbird

Hunting for nesting material for its second nesting.

Gray Catbird 190 Gray Catbird 191

Native Bee on Purple Vetch

Native Bee 190

Red Crossbill

He is a long way's off. (I find it offensive to call a sentient creature, "it")

Red Crossbill 190

White Rose

White Rose 190

Yarrow

Yarrow 190