Nature footnotes
Thursday, 9 July 2015
Every now and again, an odor awakens me. Maybe I’m not as soundly asleep as I think and something else is going on, but that strikes me as a pattern. However, it’s not often, so I may well be mistaken. This morning I woke up and I smelled skunk. I think one was trundling about near the house. Pfft. Stinky. But muted stinky. I laid awake for a while trying to decide if the smell was fading. When I was sure it was, I got up.
I walked the shoreline in the later afternoon, although at this date and latitude the sun remains high despite the time. I checked how many branches had disappeared from the dead white birch on the point that the eagle favors. No eagle; there are still protruding branches, but less so than even last year. While walking, I found only one leech. One swimming, that is. I also found a second one, limp and white-grey, with the business end missing(!?); don’t know how that happened.
We host, at minimum, hundreds of milkweeds in the field and orchard here. They are valued by the nature-oriented as hosts of the monarch butterflies. I have mixed feelings, not about having SOME milkweeds, but about having so many. Anyway, their buds are just starting to open. Here is a set that hasn’t quite yet split. The shade of dusky pink of the bud-husks is lovely.