Baltimore Checker- spot - Euphy- dryas phaeton - the oficial state butterfly of Maryland and my third new species this year.

 

Bicyclists - more than a dozen of them - head back toward Allentown after a stop at the Country Cupboard in Lenhartsville.

  Common Wood Nymph - Cercyonis pegala - is my tentative identification. If so, this represents my second new butterfly species this season.

  Kitten - one of about a dozen in this year's crop - waking from a nap in the food bowl.

  Common Ringlet - Coenonympha tullia - my first sighting of this species which is much more commonly encountered in Canada and nearby portions of the US.

  Flotilla of five kayaks and two canoes carries ten people down the Schuylkill River. They are seen here heading toward the west side of the Pennsylvania Route 61 bridge at West Hamburg. I was returning from a visit to the Kernsville Dam when I noticed them while driving across the State Street Bridge. I parked at the trailhead lot on the Hamburg side and hurried onto the bridge to catch this shot.

 

Spicebush Swallowtail surrounded by Eastern Tiger Swallowtails just outside the butterfly garden at the Kerny this spring.

  HARVESTORE silo being installed on the farm this spring. It was bought from a farm in western Maryland last fall. This year, it was dismantled, trucked to Pennsylvania, refurbished and set up.

  Tundra Swan - Cygnus colum- bianus - at the Kernsville Dam last Christmas. This is my only sighting of this species.

  Case 750K dozer I bought late last year being loaded on my lowboy trailer for the trip home. I had been looking for a Cat D5G, but this machine came up for auction with very low hours and fills a similar niche in our equipment fleet.

  Double-crested Cormorant - Phala- crocorax auritus - if I'm not mistaken. I sighted this bird perched on a log in the lake behind the Kernsville Dam last week. I've never seen a cormorant before and this one appears to be immature, so the identification is a bit tentative, but Great Cormorant generally sticks to coastal areas.

 

Great Blue Heron - Ardea herodias - dipping a freshly-skewered catfish in the pond. I warched this behavior repeated several times, both at the spot where the fish was caught and when the bird moved across the bar to a spot farther from the road. Sometimes merely dipping it, sometimes dropping it and picking it up again, occasionally trying to swallow the fish. This went on for a quarter of an hour before the heron managed to cram this large meal down its throat. I have spent that much time watching herons several times and never even saw one catch anything before, at least nothing big enough for me to see what it was.

  Green Heron - Butorides virescens - in flight at the pond on Lowland Road beside the Tilden Industrial Park. For a relatively small pond adjoining a public road, this is a very good place for a variety of wading and swimming birds. Killdeer, Canada Goose, three sorts of herons and several species of ducks are among this year's sightings there. It remains the only place where I have seen an American Coot.

  One horse-power vehicles are not too uncommon around Lenharts- ville, but this is the only one I've seen with a shiny metal body.

  Country Living - One of the joys of living on a farm, as I have for about half my life, is that you sometimes get invited to go shopping. On this occasion, we were looking for a newer and larger manure spreader. I can't say that smelling what it spreads counts as one of the joys of country life, but after three decades in fairly close proximity to cattle, I'm used to it.

  Lighthouse and pier on a mountaintop along I-68 in western Maryland - it's a church. I hope they don't expect to use it to launch a new ark, I seem to remember something about "no more water, but fire next time."

 

Blue Marsh Lake - In all the time I've lived within about ten miles of this lake, a few weeks ago was the first time I paid the $3 to get access to the developed areas at the lower end of the lake. A profusion of watercraft were in evidence from one-person PWCs to pontoon boats for floating parties. The impoundment on the Tulpehocken Creek upstream from Reading is a flood control project of the US Army Corps of Engineers.

 

Great Blue Heron - Ardea herodias - at the moment of take-off at the pond behind the Tilden Industrial Park.

  Least Skipper - Ancyloxypha numitor - mated pair - the first time I've seen a mated pair of this species which appears to have been more numerous and widespread this season than in prior years.

  Case 590 Super M Series 2 - More proof that the difference between men and boys is the size (and cost) of their toys, this is my latest major acquisition.

  Spicebush Swallow- tail - Papilio troilus - demon- strating a tendency more pronounced in some other species to feed on something other than flowers, in this case, droppings from a Canada Gooose on the dredge launch ramp at the Kernsville Dam.

 

Frieden's Church, New Ringgold, Pennsylvania

 

Firetruck fantasy - mine goes back to grade school when I would pester my father to stop the car when we passed a junkyard near our home so I could climb over the rusting hulk of a pre-WW2 engine that had belonged to the Boonsboro, Marlyand fire department. I never understood why I couldn't take it home. This one, which would have been shiny and new in those days, was offered at an auction we attended early this summer near Fort Dix, New Jersey. We went to the sale to bid on a tri-axle OTR tractor, but it went for over $50,000 which was more money than I wanted to tie up in a truck. So, I thought about dragging this firetruck home as a consolation prize - I thought restoring it might make a nice hobby for the rest of my life - but I was outbid by a guy who just wanted to part it out.

  Virginia Opossum - Didelphis virginiana - in a rare daylight sighting outside my door.

  Kayaking couple enjoy their first bit of rough water after entering the Schuylkill River below the Kernsville Dam. I wasn't quite so pleased, however, as they sent flying a dozen Common Mergansers I was trying to photograph.